On the Use of Linguistic Ontologies for Accessing and Indexing Distributed Digital Libraries

Digital libraries containing vast amounts of information are expected to soon be readily available over wide area distributed networks. As the amount of data available increases, the problem of indexing the resources efficiently and accessing them easily will also increase. There have been several approachers proposed previously: these range from simple keyword retrieval (as in DIALOG, and MEDLINE) to sophisticated approaches that analyse the internal document structure and attempt a semantic and syntactic analysis in finding suitable matches [14]. The primary characteristics of these libraries will be: A very large repository of information distributed across a wide area network. A very large range of users (ranging from naive to expert). A significant rate of change in the data leading to high update rates.