Finding the Concept, Not Just the Word: A Librarian’s Guide to Ontologies and Semantics

Aimed at students and professionals within Library and Information Services (LIS), this book is about the power and potential of ontologies to enhance the electronic search process. The book will compare search strategies and results in the current search environment and demonstrate how these could be transformed using ontologies and concept searching. Simple descriptions, visual representations, and examples of ontologies will bring a full understanding of how these concept maps are constructed to enhance retrieval through natural language queries. Readers will gain a sense of how ontologies are currently being used and how they could be applied in the future, encouraging them to think about how their own work and their users' search experiences could be enhanced by the creation of a customized ontology.

The authors, a librarian and software consultant, use their expertise to convey both the information science and technical aspects of ontologies and semantic searchWritten for librarians. Unlike most work on ontologies which is highly technical and written for professionals in computer science and knowledge management, this text is easy to understand and highlights applications of this technology that are most relevantCase studies of real life ontologies give a practical look at how they are currently being used