Wednesday, April 19, 2023
The Collexis Company• Collexis develops and implements software for
making large amounts of (un)structured data easily accessible
• Founded in 1999, 40 employees • Based in USA, NL, GE
– sales/development in the Netherlands (Geldermalsen)
• Worldwide coverage through partnerships• Collexis grants free licenses to selected projects in
developing countries
Introduction
• The main question:
“Is semantic & concept search a competitive Edge?”
“The role of the expert, trivial?”
• Collexis introduced
• Case: University Library of Wageningen
• Case: University Library of Delft
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Elementary principle: Validation
• Validation of:– Content– Source– Concept– Meaning and of interpretation
How….? By expert involvement !!– Domain restricted– Targeted Content sources
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
The Thesaurus – The Expert
• A thesaurus defines the world that we are looking at• Domain experts’ expertise is used to create a
thesaurus: therefore a thesaurus is validated knowledge
• Every user benefits from the knowledge the expert added to the thesaurus
• Natural language is very complex; a thesaurus helps us to ‘understand’ the natural language
• Find, purchase or build => validated by experts
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Levels of Ambition
document-based information retrievalidentify relevant terms in documents/query
aggregation/clusteringcombine information per subset of documents
associationlink information in a document collection
Ease of use, Ease of Search, Validated results
identify relevant terms in documents/query
Metadata aggregationcombine information per meta data and subset of documents
KnowledgeDiscovery
Explore beyond existing knowledge
1
2
3
Added value for Library
• Collexis exactly knows what text is all about– including homonyms, synonyms, multi-lingual aspects,
Hierarchy knowledge
• Search and retrieval made easy– Multiple search phrases, Combining of sources, Concept-
based search, Classification/keyword tagging
• Using the existing information– Finding experts, Knowledge actively used within the
curriculum, Detection of plagiarism
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Case: Wageningen UR Library
• Sources:– Article and Experts
• Search on:– Content and Metadata
• Ease of use, Ease of Search
• Deep linking to:– Repository
– Yellow Pages (WaY)
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Definitions
• Information retrieval (IR)the science of searching for information in documents, searching for documents themselves, searching for metadata which describe documents, or searching within (hypertext-)databases for text, sound, images or data.
• Knowledge Management (KM)refers to a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse and learning across the organization
Gathering the information
Doing something useful with it
From: www.wikipedia.org
The main Questions
• “Is semantic & concept search a competitive Edge?”
• “The role of the expert, trivial?”
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
The Case: TU Delft Library
• http://tulib.library.tudelft.nl
• Goal:Online Information Literacy Instruction that students will actually use:
• Interactive
• Intuitive
• Fun
• What you see is what you get
Online user survey
• 12 respondents so far…
• Students (mostly BSc) and Professors
• 9/12 succeed a specific task using the Tag Cloud Search
• 8/12 like using it
• 8/12 think it’s useful
Future plans
• Can the Tag Cloud Search completely replace the traditional menu?
• Improve thesaurus based on user behaviour