Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals
Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction and exploration of ontologies and demonstrates their value to information professionals.
More data and information is being created than ever before. Ontologies, formal representations of knowledge with rich semantic relationships, have become increasingly important in the context of today’s information overload and data deluge. The publishing and sharing of explicit explanations for a wide variety of conceptualizations, in a machine readable format, has the power to both improve information retrieval and discover new knowledge. Information professionals are key contributors to the development of new, and increasingly useful, ontologies.
Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals provides an accessible introduction to the following:
- defining the concept of ontologies and why they are increasingly important to information professionals
- ontologies and the semantic web
- existing ontologies, such as RDF, RDFS, SKOS, and OWL2
- adopting and building ontologies, showing how to avoid repetition of work and how to build a simple ontology
- interrogating ontologies for reuse
- the future of ontologies and the role of the information professional in their development and use.
This book will be useful reading for information professionals in libraries and other cultural heritage institutions who work with digitalization projects, cataloguing and classification and information retrieval. It will also be useful to LIS students who are new to the field.
David Stuart is an independent information professional and an honorary research fellow at the University of Wolverhampton, and was previously a research fellow at King's College London and the University of Wolverhampton. He regularly publishes in peer-reviewed academic journals and professional journals on information science, metrics, and semantic web technologies, and in 2015 began writing a regular column for the journal Online Information Review called 'Taming Metrics'. He has previously published Web Metrics for Library and Information Professionals (Facet Publishing, 2014) and Facilitating Access to the Web of Data (Facet Publishing, 2011).