Information Services and Use

Community building and community-generated content are central concepts in both Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. So far, the discussion and most of the activity in the library sphere have focused on public libraries (in the North American sense) and some academic libraries whereas e.g. national libraries have not been mentioned in this context. It can be argued, that whereas public and academic libraries serve a well-defined community (the local population or the university's students and faculty), this does not apply to national libraries. In this paper we will show that national libraries have already adopted some of the most important concepts of both Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 – but within their own specialised community and without using the Web.

Folksonomies complete the methods of indexing scientific documents. Now scientists in their function as readers may play an active role in science communication as well, since they can tag documents with terms taken from their professional or personal environment. Folksonomies allow the indexing of documents by everyone without following any rules. Besides the benefits of folksonomies there are severe problems, e.g. the tags' lack of precision. In order to overcome the shortcomings of this collaborative indexing method we introduce natural language processing of tags and a relevance ranking algorithm which is based on specific tag distributions, on aspects of collaboration and on the actions of the “prosumers”. This article is a plea for the combination of the “old” science databases and the benefits of the folksonomies.

Nowadays, web search services are considered as a valuable tool for information exploration. However, due to the extremely rapid growth of the web, search engines cannot index the new information at the same time or with the same priority and thus their performance is hampered in some extend. Besides, web search services index the disseminated information with different algorithms, having as result different response time in updating their directories. In this paper, we propose a meta-search algorithm, which is capable of self-adapting over the continuous changes that occur on the indexed web, using a web evolution adaptation mechanism. This mechanism is put in the context of real capture–recapture experiments conducted in wildlife biological studies. The meta-search algorithm also supports a monitor mechanism, which records the user's browsing behavior during his search sessions. The paper provides the implementation details of the proposed meta-search ranking algorithm along with its initial assessment over health-related information using three medical web search services. We prove in our approach, that when user's browsing behavior is jointly used with a dynamic survey mechanism, which scores the ability of each search service to adapt in the incessant evolution of the web, a more effective meta-search is provided. Experimental results showed that the precision of the third-party results, were increased in several recall levels, for a tested period between September of 2006 and April of 2007.

Although worldwide organic agriculture is constantly gaining ground compared to traditional agriculture, still a number of countries encounter problems mostly related to lack of validated information and knowledge, technical support by specialized agronomists, coordination and organization of the trading network and promoting mechanisms. The appropriate use of Web technologies and mobile computing and communications can help to the solution of the aforementioned problems. In this context, this paper presents the bio@gro e-services platform, which provides accurate, certified and multilingual content (i.e. information and services) related to organic agriculture through Internet connected devices or mobile phones using the short message service. The proposed platform takes into consideration the organic agriculture stakeholders' needs from Greece, Germany, Romania and Cyprus. More specifically, it aims at providing to organic agriculture stakeholders electronic business, electronic learning and electronic government content in four languages, namely in Greek, German, Romanian and English in order to offer information on several aspects of the organic agriculture domain, to provide the ability to exchange views and experiences as well as to compare the means, methods, practices and cultivation techniques used in each country.