Semantic Web Technology: A Key for Effective Knowledge Management: A Case Study on Facets of Law

Economic globalization, high speed internet and satellite supported telecommunication have added a new dimension to ‘Knowledge Management’ in terms of use of scholarly as well as business or commercial information. The qualitative and quantitative changes in the growth pattern of literature and information and changes in the knowledge seeking behaviour of specialized users throw up new challenges to professionals involved in the storage, management and effective retrieval of knowledge. The nature of research is also being affected compared to what it had been 10 or 15 years ago specially in the fields of science and technology and even in the social sciences. The legal issues associated with digital resources in terms of their online access and re-utilization have become very complex and sometimes confusing. To the librarian, the effective handling and management of these millions of pieces scholarly literature in digital form have become more complex. Besides, the inherent interdisciplinary character and complexities of digital rights management (DRM) adds to the problems. Law is an important and complex area seen from its applicability to varied disciplines. Due to the immense importance of law as a subject, and availability of plethora of related digital sources (i.e International & National Databases on Law), research and studies in this discipline have resulted in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarly literature with potential applications in a wide range of areas. The inter-operability issues associated with the large number of online databases and resources calls for proper metadata management for effective retrieval. Considering all these points, the facets of law and its penumbral areas need an effective management of metadata. It’s true that the interoperability protocols (z 39.50) of the Internet facilitate access to databases or files from any domain and also permit export and import of data. However, from the standpoint of effective online information retrieval with good recall and precision, it has become more difficult and complex. The shortcoming of the relational matrix of the metadata platform of the digital library infrastructure is seen as the factor affecting effective information retrieval. The semantic web technology is considered in this study as a way to overcome the shortcoming of the metadata platform, where the metadata will be arranged in an ontological semantic manner in a classaurus like structure. Considering all these factors, an effort has been made to draw a prototype model where all the key facets / isolates of Law are mapped into a SKOS model (Simple Knowledge Organization System), where the facets of law will be in an ontological semantic matrix with relational hierarchy of facets. Here the ‘relational’ hierarchy means the thesaurus like structure of the facets, where they are arranged indicating relationships such as UT (Upper term), BT (Broader term), RT (Related term), and NT (Narrower term). And then the facets are mapped into SKOS graph and then those relational facets of the SKOS graph are being translated into RDF:XML program.