E-Librarian Service ─ User-Friendly Semantic Search in Digital Libraries

This book introduces a new approach to designing E-Librarian Services. With the help of this system, users will be able to retrieve multimedia resources from digital libraries more efficiently than they would by browsing through an index or by using a simple keyword search. E-Librarian Services combine recent advances in multimedia information retrieval with aspects of human-machine interfaces, such as the ability to ask questions in natural language; they simulate a human librarian by finding and delivering the most relevant documents that offer users potential answers to their queries. The premise is that more pertinent results can be retrieved if the search engine understands the meaning of the query; the returned results are therefore logical consequences of an inference rather than of keyword matches. Moreover, E-Librarian Services always provide users with a solution, even in situations where they are unable to offer a comprehensive answer.

Dr. sc. nat. Christoph Meinel (1954) is President and CEO of the Hasso-Plattner-Institut for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) and full professor (C4) for computer science at the University of Potsdam. His research field is Internet and Web Technologies and Systems. Beside he is a teacher at the HPI School of Design Thinking, a visiting professor at the Computer Science School of the Technical University of Beijing (China) and a research fellow of the interdisciplinary center SnT at the University of Luxembourg. Since 2008 he is program director of the HPI–Stanford Design Thinking Research Program. He is author or co-author of 10 text books and monographs and has published more than 350 per-reviewed scientific papers in highly recognised international scientific journals and conferences. Dr. rer. nat. ing. Serge Linckels (1971) has studied computer-science in Luxembourg, France, and Germany. His research interests are Semantic Web, Multimedia Information Management and Retrieval, and the study and improvement of the way students learn, especially in a computer-based learning environment. He is the author of a textbook about algorithms and programming and has published over 20 peer-reviewed scientific papers in recognized international scientific journals and conferences. He is a computer-science teacher at the Lycee Technique d'Esch/Alzette, a technical high-school in Luxembourg. He lectures at the University of Luxembourg and is a researcher at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI) at the chair of Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel.