Metadata issues in Digital Libraries: key concepts and perspectives

Abstract

The article sets out to investigate the meaning, role and implications of some information management approaches used in Digital Library practice. A greater focus on innovation in managing online resources and on improving their interoperability can be achieved by normalizing metadata schemas through interoperable standards, world-wide accepted controlled vocabularies as well as by their enrichment through qualitatively constructed ontologies and linked data, which are key to the expansion of the semantic reasoning on the web through building and connection of additional semantic layers on top of metadata descriptions. Reviewing some innovative methods of information representation (LODe-BD, SWAP), the paper tries to lead the reader to discover some new ways of knowledge creation in digital information environment, in particular what concerns digital bibliographic records.