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Our Mission: To successfully establish the public library as the hub of the community in which collaborative information sharing by community members and library patrons enriches and informs their library experience, their cultural and recreational life, and their community involvement.

Connotea [1] is a free online reference management and social bookmarking service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group [2]. While somewhat experimental in nature, Connotea already has a large and growing number of users, and is a real, fully functioning service [3]. The label 'experimental' is not meant to imply that the service is any way ephemeral or esoteric, rather that the concept of social bookmarking itself and the application of that concept to reference management are both recent developments. Connotea is under active development, and we are still in the process of discovering how people will use it. In addition to Connotea being a free and public service, the core code is freely available under an open source license [4].

This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.

This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

The most exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding information about web resources, but information about and relations between things in the real world: people, places, concepts, etc.

On the Semantic Web (SemWeb), computers do the browsing (and searching, and querying, and...) for us. The SemWeb enables computers to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it. Take an analogy: the current web is a decentralized platform for distributed presentations, while the SemWeb is a decentralized platform for distributed knowledge. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the W3C standard for encoding knowledge.

This article posits a definition and theory for "Library 2.0". It suggests that recent thinking describing the changing Web as "Web 2.0" will have substantial implications for libraries, and recognizes that while these implications keep very close to the history and mission of libraries, they still necessitate a new paradigm for librarianship. The paper applies the theory and definition to the practice of librarianship, specifically addressing how Web 2.0 technologies such as synchronous messaging and streaming media, blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups might intimate changes in how libraries provide access to their collections and user support for that access.

The Open Directory Project is a web directory of Internet resources. A web directory is something akin to a huge reference library. The directory is hierarchically arranged by subject - from broad to specific. The ODP is maintained by community editors who evaluate sites for inclusion in the directory. They are our experts, and all submissions are subject to editor evaluation.

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML. 

This article focuses on the importance of public library Internet access in times of emergencies and for a range of electronic government (e–government) services at the individual and community–wide levels.

To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it provides a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval.

In this guide, we have described an ontology-development methodology for declarative frame-based systems. We listed the steps in the ontology-development process and addressed the complex issues of defining class hierarchies and properties of classes and instances. However, after following all the rules and suggestions, one of the most important things to remember is the following: there is no single correct ontology for any domain. Ontology design is a creative process and no two ontologies designed by different people would be the same. The potential applications of the ontology and the designer’s understanding and view of the domain will undoubtedly affect ontology design choices. “The proof is in the pudding”—we can assess the quality of our ontology only by using it in applications for which we designed it. 

we try to provide a starting point; an initial guide that would help a new ontology designer to develop ontologies.