Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 9, 2013

NewGenLib Open Source…Update! [Library software]

Filed under: Library,Library software,OPACS,Software — Patrick Durusau @ 12:00 pm

NewGenLib Open Source releases version 3.0.4 R1 Update 1

From the blog:

The NewGenLib Open Source has announced the release of a new version 3.0.4 R1 Update 1. NewGenLib is an integrated library management system developed by Verus Solutions in conjunction with Kesaran Institute of Information and Knowledge Management in India. The software has the modules acquisitions, technical processing, serials management, circulation, administration, and MIS reports and OPAC.

What’s new in the Update?

This new update comes with a basket of additional features and enhancements, these include:

  • Full text indexing and searching of digital attachments: NewGenLib now uses Apache Tika. With this new tool not only catalogue records but their digital attachments and URLs are indexed. Now you can also search based on the content of your digital attachments
  • Web statistics: The software facilitates the generation of statistics on OPAC usage by having an allowance for Google Analytics code.
  • User ratings of Catalogue Records: An enhancement for User reviews is provided in OPAC. Users can now rate a catalogue record on a scale of 5 (Most useful to not useful). Also, one level of approval is added for User reviews and ratings. 
  • Circulation history download: Users can now download their Circulation history as a PDF file in OPAC

NewGenLib supports MARC 21 bibliographic data, MARC authority files, Z39.50 Client for federated searching. Bibliographic records can be exported in MODS 3.0 and AGRIS AP . The software is OAI-PMH compliant. NewGenLib has a user community with an online discussion forum.

If you are looking for potential topic map markets, the country population rank graphic from Wikipedia may help:
World Population Graph

Population isn’t everything but it should not be ignored either.

December 14, 2010

Invenio – Library Software

Filed under: Library software,OPACS,Software — Patrick Durusau @ 7:51 am

Invenio (new release)

From the website:

Invenio is a free software suite enabling you to run your own digital library or document repository on the web. The technology offered by the software covers all aspects of digital library management from document ingestion through classification, indexing, and curation to dissemination. Invenio complies with standards such as the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol (OAI-PMH) and uses MARC 21 as its underlying bibliographic format. The flexibility and performance of Invenio make it a comprehensive solution for management of document repositories of moderate to large sizes (several millions of records).

Invenio has been originally developed at CERN to run the CERN document server, managing over 1,000,000 bibliographic records in high-energy physics since 2002, covering articles, books, journals, photos, videos, and more. Invenio is being co-developed by an international collaboration comprising institutes such as CERN, DESY, EPFL, FNAL, SLAC and is being used by about thirty scientific institutions worldwide (see demo).

One of many open source library projects where topic maps are certainly relevant.

Questions:

Choose one site for review and one for comparison from General/Demo – Invenio

  1. What features of the site you are reviewing could be enhanced by the use of topic maps? Give five (5) specific search results that could be improved and then say how they could be improved. (3-5 pages, include search results)
  2. Are your improvements domain specific? Use the comparison site in answering this question. (3-5 pages, no citations)
  3. How would you go about making the case for altering the current distribution? What is the payoff for the end user? (not the same as enhancement, asking about when end users would find easier/better/faster. Perhaps you should ask end users? How would you do that?) (3-5 pages, no citations)

August 2, 2010

…Library of Congress Subject Heading for Social Tags

Filed under: Cataloging,Classification,LCSH,OPACS — Patrick Durusau @ 6:46 pm

“A Semantic Similarity Approach for Predicting Library of Congress Subject Headings for Social Tags,” by Kwan Yi, appears in JASIST, 61(8):1658-1672, 2010. This is an important article for library students to read. Carefully.

The author recognizes that linking social tags to controlled vocabularies may help with the organization of information that is only socially tagged. And the article is a good review of the application of five popular measures of semantic similarity metrics.

The interesting step for the article would be the reverse of the author’s suggested: “The study of introducing the LCSH to give a control to social tags…”(p. 1670).

Why not introduce “social tags” to enrich the finding experience of users in LCSH settings?

A substantial body of users find information with “social tags,” so why not offer that option?

The user experience with “social tags” along side LCSH headings in a library setting awaits future research.

May 11, 2010

Subject World

Filed under: Access Points,Cataloging,Classification,Examples,LCSH,OPACS,Subject Headings — Patrick Durusau @ 9:01 am

Subject World (Japanese only)

Subject World is a project to visualize heterogeneous terminology, including catalogs, for use with library catalogs. Uses BSH4 subject headings (Basic Subject Headings) and NDC9 index terms (Nippon Decimal Classification) to visualize and retrieve information from the Osaka City University OPAC.

English language resources:

Subject World: A System for Visualizing OPAC (paper)

Slides with the same title (but different publication from the paper):

Subject World: A System for Visualizing OPAC (slides)

See also: Murakami Harumi Laboratory, in particular its research and publication pages.

May 10, 2010

Subject Headings and Topic Maps

Filed under: Cataloging,Examples,LCSH,OPACS,Subject Headings,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:44 am

Leveraging on prior work should be part of any topic map project.

Building topic maps with subject headings? See: Making topic maps from Subject Headings, a slide pack from Motomu Naito, a regular contributor in the topic maps community.

Project is using NDLSH 2008 (National Diet Library Subject Headings, subject headings 17,953), BSH4 (Basic Subject Headings, Japanese Library Association, subject headings, 7847), LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings, subject headings, 372,399).

Slides describe organizing Wikipedia using subject headings, merging subjects with subject headings, and, using LSCH subjects as a bridges to map between subject headings in different languages.

Forward to your local library researcher.

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