About
About JeromeDL

JeromeDL - eLibrary with Semantics

[Semantic Digital Library]



JeromeDL is a Social Semantic Digital Library. As a digital library, it allows institutions to easily publish documents on the Web. It supports a variety of document formats and allows to store and query a rich bibliographic description of each document.

To find relevant documents in JeromeDL users can use searching and browsing features. Whole documents content can be searched through, as well as single fields of the documents description, like author or publish year. Users can also find documents by browsing content of subject categories and keywords.

With JeromeDL's social and semantic services every library user can bookmark interesting books, articles or other materials in semantically annotated directories. Users can allow others to see their bookmarks and annotations and share their knowledge within a social network. JeromeDL can also treat a single library resource as a blog post. Users can comment the content of the resource and reply to others' comments and this way create new knowledge.


JeromeDL is a joined project between the Main Library of Gdansk University of Technology [http://www.bg.pg.gda.pl/] and DERI.International [http://www.deri.org/].


The main requirements for JeromeDL from librarians and library users were:

  • support the legacy of classic libraries (e.g., antique books).

  • provide user-oriented browsing features,

  • allow efficient searching,

  • cover security and accounting constraints,

  • support multiple formats of resources,

  • enable communication with other digital library systems

  • utilize results of latest results in Semantic Web and communication and information management research.

JeromeDLs middleware implements features like viewing resources, searching and browsing, users' profile management (based on FOAF) and resources management. The description and content of the resources, e.g., the fulltext index of the resource's content, MARC21 and BibTeX bibliographic descriptions and semantic description according to the Jerome ontology are held in several stores. Apart from the textual resources the JeromeDL system has been designed to also handle the collections of scans of old books and other binary resources like e.g. Macromedia Flash presentations. A communication link to the outside world enables searching in a network of digital libraries.

The database content of the JeromeDL system is rendered in XHTML following an HTTP request. To administrate the content of the database and to describe the resources in the database a stand-alone application, JeromeAdmin, is utilized. JeromeAdmin communicates with the main system through the RMI (Remote Method Invocation) protocol. The content of the JeromeDL database can be searched not only through web pages of the digital library but also from the other digital libraries and other web applications through a special web services interface based on the Extensible Library Protocol (ELP).

Although even "bricks and mortar" libraries were initially meant to handle only books, users usually find a far larger variety of resources. Following the same paradigm the JeromeDL system supports not only resources in PDF or RTF formats, but also other multimedia content (e.g. Flash presentations). To support both flexibility and specialization in resources handling, each resource has its own description of its structure.

If it is possible the resource is stored in the XSL:FO format that allows the reader to choose between different rendered types, e.g. PDF, RTF, HTML. The content of the resources can be additionally protected from printing or copying (if applicable) with an ACL (access control list) attached to the resource.

Very often a digital library user searching for information is flooded with an abundance of inadequate query results. Many attempts have been taken to limit the number of answers of the query process. The research on the usability of search features covers a large variety of approaches, from word-sense disambiguation based on boolean expressions and lexicons to the dynamic query user interfaces.

Apart from providing access to the resources in the database, a digital library system is expected to provide resources discovery and navigation features. The JeromeDL system aims to deliver high quality of searching (discovery) and browsing (navigation) features. A diversity of metadata utilized in our digital library system reflects the sophistication of the search algorithm. To achieve result sets closest to the users's requirements, concepts of content, meaning and user preferences have been adapted for the semantic search algorithm. While the user is browsing the JeromeDL's databases the semantically enabled user profile is annotated with statistical information. Then profiles are utilized in the search process.

The most convenient way to add resources to the JeromeDL system and describe them is by using the stand-alone Java administration application - JeromeAdmin. The JeromeAdmin application provides an interface for generating the description of resources and uploading the content of the resource to the system database. With JeromeAdmin an administrator can attach the MARC21 and BibTeX bibliographic description as well as ontological annotations to the resource. Users are able to submit resources to JermeDL as well. In this case a two stage process is required. First a user submits the content of the resource and the set of descriptions. Then the administrator approves and finalizes the submission of the resource to the database.
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