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The aim of this paper is to introduce the special issue on the Semantic Web. Intensive research has been undertaken worldwide in research centres and several achievements have been accomplished towards the ultimate objective: the expression and the exploitation of humanity's collective knowledge.

A multi‐fold strategy for the preparation of this special issue was deployed. Given the special characteristics, a balanced mix of introductory papers to the topic, and also advanced research papers at the leading edge of Semantic Web evolution, were selected.

The paper summarizes the articles of the issue and also provides help in understanding the Semantic Web Roadmap of Digital Libraries.

Introduces the papers in the special issue.

Purpose – Several systems for the management of digital libraries have evolved in the recent past from simple document repository to sophisticated applications that provide the possibility of classifying and, in some cases, even rating the documents collected in the library itself. In a few of those systems members of the community of practice that uses and produces the library itself can also be active in assigning a reputation score to each other. This study aimed to explore the idea of using a collectively negotiated term taxonomy in order to develop a better model for the automated evaluation of users’ competence on different discussion topics. Design/methodology/approach – The study provides a formalization of the approach we propose, and the proposal of an architecture for implementing a system deploying the approach. Findings – The study analyses the issues related to the implementation of a digital library, and develops an architecture that aims to evaluate users’ competence about different discussion topics in an automated way. Research limitations/implications – The paper only describes an abstract architecture of a self‐balancing digital library. Further research should investigate the different possible choices for the implementation details that have been left out from this first explorative analysis. Originality/value – The novelty of the approach resides in the fact that we make use of a collectively negotiated taxonomy in order to automatically assign relevance scores to reviewers’ evaluations.

The huge volume of biomedical literature provides a nice opportunity and challenge to induce novel knowledge by finding some connections among logical‐related medical concepts This paper aims to propose a semantic‐based knowledge discovery system for mining novel connections from large online digital libraries.

The method takes advantages of the biomedical ontologies, MeSH and UMLS, as the source of semantic knowledge. A prototype system, Biomedical Semantic‐based Knowledge Discovery System (Bio‐SbKDS), is designed to uncover novel hypothesis/connections hidden in the biomedical literature. Using only the starting concept and the initial semantic relation derived from UMLS, Bio‐SbKDS can automatically generate the semantic types as category restrictions for concepts. Using the semantic types and semantic relations of the biomedical concepts, Bio‐SbKDS can identify the relevant concepts collected from Medline in terms of the semantic type and generate the novel hypothesis between these concepts based on the semantic relations.

The system successfully replicates Dr Swanson's famous discoveries: Raynaud disease/fish oil automatically, and generates much less intermediate concepts and spurious connections.

The method takes full advantage of the semantic knowledge of the biomedical concepts, compared with previous approaches, our methods generate much less but more relevant novel hypotheses. Another significant advantage over other traditional approaches is that our method requires much less human intervention in the discovery procedure.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview about the Semantic Web, its importance and history and an overview of recent Semantic Web technologies which can be used to enhance digital libraries.

The paper answers, at least partially, questions like “What is the Semantic Web?”, “How could the Semantic Web look like?”, “Why is the Semantic Web important?”, “What are ontologies?” and “Where are we now?”. Several pointers to further literature and web sites complete the overview.

Semantic Web technologies are valuable add‐ons for digital libraries. There already exist numerous academic and commercial tools which can be applied right now.

The overview of Semantic Web technologies cannot be complete in such an article, therefore we limit ourselves to the most prominent technologies available. However, following the pointers given readers can easily find more information.

The article is of particular value for newcomers in this area.

Purpose – This paper proposes enhancing libraries to act as knowledge management centers for small businesses, providing both knowledge management (KM) and competitive intelligence (CI) services. Design/methodology/approach – The requirements for a Library Knowledge Management Center (LKMC) are presented and briefly examined. KM, CI, ontologies, and the Semantic Web are all considered, and the steps needed to realize a LKMC are presented. Findings – An approach to developing a LKMC is provided, as is a rationale for the proposal. Future research issues for realization of this proposal are addressed. Research limitations/implications – This paper presents a conceptual overview of a project that is still in its early stages, and as such its practicality is difficult to evaluate. Practical implications – This proposal, if followed up with future research, will prove beneficial to both small business and to libraries. Small businesses are not always able to gather sufficient internal and external knowledge to assist in strategic planning and positioning, and thus are unable to compete with larger rivals whose resources allow them to develop sophisticated KM and CI systems. LKMCs hold promise to level the playing field. Libraries benefit because this reaffirms their relevance in a digital age in which so much information is freely available to patrons. Originality/value – This paper proposes a new service for libraries, one that will assist small businesses in competing more effectively with larger competitors.

This paper aims to describe the main challenges of identifying and accessing useful information and knowledge about natural hazards and disasters results. The paper presents a grid‐based digital library system designed to address the challenges.

The need to organize and publish metadata about European research results in the field of natural disasters has been met with the help of two innovative technologies: the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). OGSA provides a common platform for sharing distributed metadata securely. RDF facilitates the creation and exchange of metadata.

Using grid technology allows the RDF metadata of European research results in the field of natural disasters to be shared securely and effectively in a heterogeneous network environment.

A metadata approach is proposed for the extraction of the metadata, and their distribution to third parties in batch, and their sharing with other applications can be a quickly process. Furthermore, a method is set out to describe metadata in a common and open format, which can become a widely accepted standard; the existence of a common standard enables the metadata storage in different platforms while supporting the capability of distributed queries across different metadata databases, the integration of metadata extracted from different sources, etc. It can be used for the general‐purpose search engines.

To describe how semantic knowledge technology can be used to enhance a digital library.

The paper examines the main research challenges in the field of digital libraries and identifies the extent to which semantic knowledge technology can be used to respond to these challenges. Functionality developed within the SEKT project (http://sekt.semanticweb.org) is used to enhance an existing digital library. The development of a good ontology is central to such an application, and the paper describes the particular ontology engineering approach adopted.

Four broad challenges were identified: achieving interoperability; describing objects and repositories; managing multimedia collections; and improving user interfaces and human‐computer interaction. The SEKT digital library case study is using semantic knowledge technology to respond to the first two and the last of these. The paper describes how this is being done and the kind of enhanced functionality being developed.

The paper is of value in understanding how semantic knowledge technology can enhance information management in general and a digital library in particular.

To propose methods for expressing semantics and operating semantics in largely distributed environment, such as peer‐to‐peer (P2P) based digital libraries (DLs) where heterogeneous schemas may exist and the relationships among them must be explicated for better performance in information searching.

In conventional solutions, a mediator is adopted to create and maintain the matching between relevant terms such that distinct but relevant metadata schemas can be integrated according to the mapping relationships in the mediator. However, such solutions suffer some problems originated from the static matching in mediator. This paper proposes to use facts to express the relationships among heterogeneous schemas and conduct the reasoning dynamically by using inference engines.

It is justified to use facts and inference engines to express and operate the semantics among heterogeneous but relevant information resources. The user can choose to convert only part of the XML document into facts if she can unpeel deeply nested XML tags. Additionally, it is possible for the user to manually edit (assert, update or retract) the facts as needed in the reasoning.

The study assumes that peers are clustered according to shared topics or interest. An exhaust evaluation has not been conducted.

Each node can publish its schema to the involved peer community such that other peers can automatically discover the specific schema. A local matchmaking engine is adopted as well in order to automatically generate the relations between its own schema and the retrieved ones.

This paper provides a framework for semantic data integration in P2P networks.

To describe a browsing and searching personalization system for digital libraries based on the use of ontologies for describing the relationships between all the elements which take part in a digital library scenario of use.

Identification of all the desired functionalities and requirements that are necessary to fully integrate the use of a digital library in an e‐learning environment, and the basic elements that are used to build the ontology that describes such scenario.

The elements that determine the functionalities of the desired personalization system: first, the user's profile, including navigational history and user preferences; and second, the information collected from the navigational behavior of the digital library users.

The ontology is not complete. In fact, the ontology in itself will evolve with the new apparition of desired functionalities and requirements of the personalization system.

Such a personalization system will be very helpful to the users of a digital library to improve their experience of use.

The use of ontologies promotes the integration of new services into existing ones, and the interoperability with other systems through the appropriate semantic web services. New system functionalities and requirements can be added by including the appropriate description into the ontology framework that defines the digital library scenario of use.

Aims to bridge the gap between grid computing and semantic exploitation of information commonly met in digital library infrastructures.

This paper introduces a semantic digital library framework based on grid technology. It follows the OGSA specifications for the development of grid infrastructures capable of efficiently handling such information. It is a service‐oriented approach based on common web technologies such as the web browser and web server. The design principles of the proposed framework take into account the emerging need to exploit the semantics of its underlying information through the employment of adequate open standard technologies such as RDF and OWL.

Although semantic exploitation of large data sets used to be a difficult and resource‐consuming activity usually taking place in specialized, highly equipped laboratories, this work demonstrates that emerging technologies like the grid and emerging standards like RDF/OWL are capable of bringing such research closer to the average workstation.

The lack of a working prototype based on the proposed framework limits the usefulness of the results deriving from this paper.

This paper can serve as a starting point to researchers wishing to conduct research in the area of the semantic grid as applied to digital library infrastructures.