The new knowledge infrastructure - Springer

Use the link to access the full text article from the International Journal on Digital Libraries.  " ... Increasingly, we also study using algorithms. Projects like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collect so much data that it cannot be viewed by a single individual. Instead, the purpose of the data is for data mining. We have computational studies of authorship, stylometrics, analyses of paintings and musical performance, and other topics of scholarship to complement the scientific data mining of galaxies, chemical molecules, or weather events. How do we enable these new kinds of scholarship? We need a new kind of knowledge infrastructure that will offer more than the rudimentary search and retrieval capabilities possible today. Conventional library subject indexing for books may be old-fashioned now that we have full text searching. A few years ago the Library of Congress floated a study even suggesting that the assignment of LCSH categories be phased out (the community objected). But we now need to search images, data, and other resources where text search is not immediately applicable. In addition, we have problems of quantity. The more material to be studied, the more accurate searching must be, so retrieval algorithms of greater resolving power are needed. And it is not just that individual projects are gathering more data, but that data availability is extending across disciplines and around the world. The knowledge infrastructure we need must emphasize interoperability across areas and institutions. Libraries led the way with cooperative cataloging and standards for electronic records.  Open Archives protocol use has now spread as well, but museums are trying an even more ambitious kind of description with 'linked open data.' In the spirit of the Semantic Web, museums are putting their catalog information into RDF (resource description format). In this methodology, all information about an object is recorded as a subject–predicate–object triple, with the predicates and objects taken from official ontologies with very precise definitions. The British Museum and the Rijksmuseum are leaders in this effort, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ..."