Libraries have always been an inspiration for the standards and technologies developed by semantic web activities. However, except for the Dublin Core specification, semantic web and social networking technologies have not been widely adopted and further developed by major digital library initiatives and projects. Yet semantic technologies offer a new level of flexibility, interoperability, and relationships for digital repositories.

Kruk and McDaniel present semantic web-related aspects of current digital library activities, and introduce their functionality; they show examples ranging from general architectural descriptions to detailed usages of specific ontologies, and thus stimulate the awareness of researchers, engineers, and potential users of those technologies. Their presentation is completed by chapters on existing prototype systems such as JeromeDL, BRICKS, and Greenstone, as well as a look into the possible future of semantic digital libraries.

This book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in areas like digital libraries, the semantic web, social networks, and information retrieval. This audience will benefit from detailed descriptions of both todays possibilities and also the shortcomings of applying semantic web technologies to large digital repositories of often unstructured data.

Sebastian Ryszard Kruk is a researcher and project manager at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland and a lecturer affiliated with Gdansk University of Technology, Poland (GUT) since 2002. Together with Prof. Henryk Krawczyk (GUT) he came up with an idea of applying semantic web technologies to digital libraries which was first implemented at GUT under the Elvis-DL project. He is works on the JeromeDL project, a reference implementation of the semantic digital library.

Bill McDaniel is currently the Project Executive, eLearning Cluster, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway. Bill has been active in information technology for 31 years. Prior to joining DERI he was with Adobe Systems as a  Senior Scientist researching semantic technologies, emerging technologies and developing a technology strategy for the company. He also opened the first Internet café in North Texas and a digital recording studio.