Reading Notes: Web 3.0 and Health Librarians
Posted by: Fiona in libraries, semantic web, web 3.0
Allan Cho and Dean Giustini have recently published an article on Web 3.0 and Health Libraries [PDF]. It’s a good introduction to Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web in their field of librarianship. They discuss some of the definitions of Web 3.0 and their own vision, noting -
“The common theme here is a focus on information organization and retrieval”
Cho and Giustini explain why Web 3.0/Semantic Web will be good for health librarians - because it will improve the accuracy and efficiency of searching. Searching for health information now is difficult - not only because there is a great deal of specificity in searching some of the big databases (MeSH helps some, but not everyone can/will use it) but trying to work out what information is reliable can be very difficult.
The article describes other problems with current search technologies - it is easy to miss important information because of the way searches are constructed and limitations of databases. Findability and trust is important.
Library standards and other projects are also discussed, like RDA and RDF. But one very important point that Cho and Guistini make is that,
“there is a sense that the two groups - library professionals and semantic technologists - do not communicate or see their potential synergies.”
It is important that librarians are participating in discussions about the Semantic Web and RDF, but at the same time, we should be welcoming in those who might be interested in how we do things.
Reference:
Cho, A., Giustini, D. (2008). Web 3.0 and health librarians: an introduction. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 29(1), 13-18.
Entries (RSS)
May 1st, 2008 at 3:48 am
Thanks for your analysis of our paper Fiona. Dean and I absolutely agree that librarians should play a key part in the new Web. However, we weren’t the first to say so. And definitely not the first to opine about the importance of information organization and Web 3.0. Katherine Adams’ “The Semantic Web: Differentiating BetweenTaxonomies and Ontologies” in 2002 (two years before O’Reilly’s Web 2.0!) had argued that computer science and librarianship have a great deal in common. The space for collaboration is there. But interestingly, ever since then, no one really followed up on her take. Until recently… Hopefully, as librarians, we can pick up where she had left off.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 pm
do you know any information about this subject in other languages?
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 pm
I’ve only just started looking into this, but there is a strong French language Semantic Web community, and presumably a strong Chinese language community given the huge output hapening there reported at WWW2008.
Good idea for a post though, to do a roundup of what is happening in different communities.
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:30 am
Will this be down scalable and able to be integrated into a smaller health information site? What resources are available for a smaller health information webmaster and any idea what costs for the platform would be?