A Knowledge Network Constructed by Integrating Classification, Thesaurus and Metadata in Digital Library

Abstract

For the digital libraries of China, the development of networked information resources, especially of metadata, is still a principal task. In the same time, a huge amount of information resources has been accumulated and the exploitation of them is far from sufficient. The current chief utility-keyword search undermines seriously the potential values of them, especially the metadata, for the metadata contain valuable content description and indexing information. To solve this problem, we devise a new paradigmintegrated knowledge network. It is formed by merging the classification and thesaurus into a concept network and then distributing the metadata records into the concept nodes according to their subjects, just like the "shelving" of the metadata. We have built an experiment system Vision by incorporating a portion of the Chinese Classification and Thesaurus with the bibliographic data of computing domain from Peking University Library. Such a knowledge network is not only a framework for metadata organizing, but also a structure for knowledge navigation, retrieval and learning, and we believe it will be a catalyst for the digital libraries to come to knowledge management.