Scientific/engineering and cultural content moving toward the Semantic Web

Monday morning at the NFAIS conference: the first session presented three fascinating examples of next-generation content enhancement approaches. Call them Semantic Web, Web 3.0 or what have you, each offered signposts for broader trends in the coming information content environment.

Most striking (and commercially significant) was today’s announcement (and the presentation by Rafael Sidi, vice president of product development for Elsevier's Engineering and
Technology Division/Corporate Markets) of illumin8, the result of a partnership between Elsevier and NetBase, Inc. From the press release:

illumin8 combines search and semantic indexing technologies to distill deep meaning, purpose and insight from…Elsevier’s full-text content, scientific abstracts from 4,000 publishers, patents and billions of web pages. This research tool extracts and analyzes solutions, which are then categorized under organizations, products, technologies, approaches, and experts. illumin8 is designed to go beyond simple keyword search, quickly finding and extracting crisp summarized answers and interrelationships that are semantically related to the context of the search query.

Krista Mantsch, senior research librarian at the National Geographic Society, provided an impressive overview of the many ways in which her organization is applying Web 2.0 technologies to the extension of the library’s services across the Society and its partners.  Most interesting to this blogger was the one externally-focused project she discussed, called Metalens. The result of another technology partnership, with Clear Path Labs, it is a beta initiative that uses semantic techniques to tie media and metadata to maps - connecting the “where” to the “what” and the “when,” to create a "bigger picture" (such as the travel narratives that NGS staff are beginning to create) from small, related media assets.

Finally, Martin Kalfatovic, head of the new media office and preservation services at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, described the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) project, created to support the Encyclopedia of Life inspired by E.O. Wilson and launched last May. The BHL is a collaboration among several major research libraries and museums involved with biology and botany. It is developing a corpus of some 300 million pages of relevant literature being scanned with the help of the Internet Archive. Of particular interest is a focus on creating “taxonomic intelligence,” using automated structural markup, semantic markup with geographic and taxonomic tags, and a variety of persistent identifiers. The BHL is seeking to work with publishers of copyrighted content, offering the advantages of scanning, structuring and managing their content, exposing it more widely, and imbedding it in related knowledge. To date, though, only a few small publishers are participating.