A water conservation digital library using ontologies

New technologies are emerging that assist in organizing and retrieving knowledge stored in a variety of forms (books, papers, models, decision support systems, databases), but they can only be evaluated through real world applications. Ontology has been used to manage the Water Conservation Digital Library holding a growing collection of various types of digital resources in the domain of urban water conservation in Florida, USA. The ontology based back-end powers a fully operational web interface, available at http://library.conservefloridawater.org . The system has already demonstrated numerous benefits of the ontology application, including: easier and more precise finding of resources, information sharing and reuse, and proved to effectively facilitate information management.