The half-day seminar, conducted by Dr. Biswanath Dutta, Associate Professor, Documentation Research and Training Centre, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, aims to help enhance the retrieval and information search process of libraries
16 August, 2022, Bengaluru: On 12th August 2022, IIM Bangalore observed National Librarians' Day on campus, with a half-day seminar on Knowledge Graphs and Ontologies used in library technical services to enhance the retrieval and information search process, conducted by Dr. Biswanath Dutta, Associate Professor, Documentation Research and Training Centre, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore.
Prof. Dutta demonstrated the creation of linked data, existing library ontologies and knowledge graphs using open-source solutions Protégé, DBGraph, and Sparql. These concepts have enormous potential and their implementation in the Union catalogue project of IIMs, Discovery Layers, and other searching interfaces has the promise to be a great enabler.
National Librarians' Day is observed on the 12th of August every year to commemorate the birth anniversary of Padmashri Dr. S. R. Ranganathan (1892-1972), considered the father of Library Science in India. He was a Professor of Mathematics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, and was instrumental in crafting fundamental theories for the science of knowledge organization.
Professor Subhashish Gupta, Chairperson, Library Committee and faculty of the Economics & Social Sciences area, IIM Bangalore, inaugurated the seminar, advising the library staff to engage in professional development. Also present at the event was Professor Rishikesha T Krishnan, Director, IIM Bangalore.
Dr. Rama Patnaik, Librarian at IIMB, highlighted the importance of exploring all opportunities of improving skills and being relevant in the digital world, in order to be key stakeholders in the ecosystem of Research and Learning. She also thanked the senior faculty members and the Library Committee for providing the professional space and opportunities which would help enrich skills and contribute to the academic and research journey of the IIMB community.
Libraries are one of the many knowledge organization domains that use controlled vocabularies, metadata schemas, syntaxes, and thesauri to show the relationship between resources, but use closed technologies and are conservative about using controlled thesauri for describing its collection. As a result, most of the content generated by libraries and museums remains unexplored on the internet.
Of late, national libraries such as the British National Library and National Library of France have identified the opportunities to modernize and implement linked data and vision of semantic web using ontologies to model library catalogues with existing standards such as FRBR Ontology LC Bibliographic Framework BIBFRAME, etc.
These initiatives’ significance is transforming library data into a more semantic and reusable data form using ontologies and W3C recommended technologies like RDF. It will not only enrich the data but also provide integrated access to data, empower the idea of reusability, offer federated search facility, and encourage aggregation by other third-party systems.