Visual Semantic Modeling of Digital Libraries

Abstract

The current interest from non-experts who wish to build digital libraries (DLs) is strong worldwide. However, since DLs are complex systems, it usually takes considerable time and effort to create and tailor a DL to satisfy specific needs and requirements of target communities/societies. What is needed is a simplified modeling process and rapid generation of DLs. To enable this, DLs can be modeled with descriptive domain-specific languages. A visual tool would be helpful to non-experts so they may model a DL without knowing the theoretical foundations and the syntactic details of the descriptive language. In this paper, we present a domain-specific visual DL modeling tool, 5SGraph. It employs a metamodel that describes DLs using the 5S theory. The output from 5SGraph is a DL model that is an instance of the metamodel, expressed in the 5S description language. Furthermore, 5SGraph maintains semantic constraints specified by the 5S metamodel and enforces these constraints over the instance model to ensure semantic consistency and correctness. 5SGraph enables component reuse to reduce the time and effort of designers. 5SGraph also is designed to accommodate and integrate several other complementary tools reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of DLs. Thus, tools based on concept maps to fulfill those roles are introduced. The 5SGraph tool has been tested with real users and several modeling tasks in a usability experiment, and its usefulness and learnability have been demonstrated.