Finding the right word for the right occasion can be a challenge, particularly in the academic environment where there is often a real delight on the part of the academic at inventing a new word for a concept only they understand. This work goes a long way towards demystifying some of the words, phrases and relationships of many concepts circulating in academic institutions and publications.
Growing from a specific project aimed at a search mechanism that would take more general questions and analyse them semantically to obtain more of the meanings behind the question, this work has much to offer the professional information manager. The authors start by posing the question “What if the search engine understood the concepts behind the question, rather than just matching the text?” They then explore just how ontologies and semantics can be used to improve access to critical information – information not always obvious from initial questions to the library.
Finding the Concept argues that information managers have the potential to assist in building ontologies – gathering terms, arranging them into categories and then adding relationships – is an appropriate and timely task. Having established these frameworks it is a logical next step to apply semantic web technology. The combination is potentially powerful offering a major improvement to the user/information interaction.
For people who are interested in search engines or finding out about how they do their searching, this work is a real winner. Based very much on real‐life experience the authors work through issues of ontologies, terms used to describe and represent an area of knowledge, in order to establish the way concepts are constructed. They then move on to semantic technologies and how these may be used to search more effectively for concepts behind the simpler questions. As a means of finding “what I really wanted when I wasn't sure of the question to ask” this is rather helpful and hopeful material. All too often library staffs are faced with research questions that are somewhat vague or maybe lacking in specific direction. Finding the Concept offers some real solutions to this problem.
Much of the material dealt with in this work focuses on the potential for the semantic web. Essentially what the authors conclude is that in the semantic web lies the solution to a far more effective means of searching that involves interpretation of simple questions, the identifying of related ontologies and the outcome of more relevant data. To them the important first step is for professional library staff to begin to build their understanding of the concepts behind the semantic web, fine tune their existing skills with search terms and to begin exploring the potential for more detailed digital searching.
Finding the Concept is perhaps not a book for everyone and has its fair share of technical material – however, within its pages are some extremely important ideas. As the technology develops, these are more and more likely to become a part of our daily lives. What the authors are suggesting in summary is that we are heading for a semantic web, things are moving that way and we had best all get ready for it now.
