Bibliographic ontology

Abstract

The idea of bibliographic ontology comes from actual needs rather than today's common push to use the technology simply because it exists. The librarian community has always been enthusiastic to technical novelties to improve their work and make it more efficient. It is no different today. Managing bibliographic resources such as books was always a serious task. The goals are simple: to allow those who need access to the information quickly and surely. Unfortunately, these simple goals become more and more difficult to accomplish in the environment of dynamically growing number of resources and users. The problem of information overload has become one of the major concerns in the Internet era. The publishing model of the Internet allows anyone, anywhere and anytime to publish their work and to make it publicly available. It is in both the author's and the reader's interest to make access to such resources as straightforward as possible. What could be accomplished by paper cards in nineteenth century libraries is not enough today. The most common bibliographic resource-a book-may seem simple to manage. We may state the author, title and perhaps a short summary and hope someone will notice it. But what about finding other books from the same field of knowledge? What about checking author's professional background? Or technical article reviews? What about finding aerial photos of San Francisco Bay showing Golden Gate Bridge construction? © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.