What does semantic web mean to librarians? It may mean moving away from an orientation to the human user when creating metadata, to constructing for the machine.
"In many respects, the most important question for the library world in examining semantic web technologies is whether librarians can successfully transform their expertise in working with metadata into expertise in working with ontologies or models of knowledge. Whereas traditional library metadata has always been focused on helping humans find and make use of information, semantic web ontologies are focused on helping machines find and make use of information. Traditional library metadata is meant to be seen and acted on by humans, and as such has always been an uncomfortable match with relational database technology. Semantic web ontologies, in contrast, are meant to make metadata meaningful and actionable for machines. An ontology is thus a sort of computer program, and the effort of making an RDF schema is the first step of telling a computer how to process a type of information."
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