"A man of destiny knows that beyond this hill lies another and another. The journey is never complete."
-F.W. de Klerk

IPE

We are currently deploying experimental economic mechanisms within SMS, the UMDL's Service Market Society. Agents exchange library resources and services through the market, with prices determined through a distributed auction process. Research on pricing of intellectual property is ongoing through the PEAK project.

Conspectus

Ontology

We have developed a high level ontological description of intellectual work, using as our foundation an intellectual work hierarchy, originally developed by IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations, now heavily modified. This hierachy provides us with a core set of concepts from whuich we can describe intellectual work, services, and rights.

Metadata set

We have in use a metadata set useful for online textual, image, and multimedia materials, which is updated and modified in conjuction with changes in the ontology.

Beethoven

We have started mapping the MARC metadata of over 450 records concerning Beethoven from the MIRLYN database to our ontology, to both explore mapping to our ontology and to identify gaps in our framework of concepts and relationships. This looks to be very useful, leading us to the development of ontogenic relationships between and among works, and a better understanding of the boundary between higher level ontolgies and domain specific ontologies.

 

We have an excellent new UMDL demo titled Ontology-Based Metadata. It is a java applet that provides access to a knowledge base.