New SW Case Study by the German National Library of Economics

Posted on June 7, 2009 by Ivan Herman

The Leibnitz Information Centre for Economics of the German National Library of Economics (the world’s largest economics library) has provided a W3C Semantic Web Case Study on the Web based publication of the STW Thesaurus for Economics of the library. The thesaurus is published in RDF (using also RDFa) based on the SKOS vocabulary. This thesaurus is also connected to the library’s own catalog; users of the STW website can browse the pages and trigger a search for indexed media items by clicking on the book icon. This opens thematic access paths for the retrieval of library resources. Additional links were created to dbpedia entities, which enable linking to Wikipedia pages.

ZBW has also deployed a SPARQL endpoint and a terminology web service built on the endpoint. The service provides, for example, search for concepts, narrower terms, or synonyms. It also powers the autosuggest incremental search service on the STW web site.

About Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.

Comments are closed.