iULib: where UDL and Wikipedia could meet

Abstract

Empowering the group collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities for the Universal Digital Library (UDL) is definitely an important work after more than 1.5 million digitalized books were open to access online. One motivation of developing such a platform is the emergence of Web 2.0 in recent years, especially with the rapidly increased popularity of Wikipedia. This paper presents our vision, which we call iULib, about where and how UDL and Wikipedia could meet. In the first phase, we directly apply the Wiki architecture and software in UDL to upgrade the digital library as an interactive platform that facilitates community and collaboration. Preliminary implementation shows the feasibility and reliability of our design. Furthermore, as a free encyclopedia that assembles contributions from different users, Wikipedia may also be used as a knowledge base for UDL. As a result, UDL can be upgraded as an intelligent platform for information retrieval and knowledge sharing. Our practice at the WikipediaMM task in the ImgeCLEF 2008 shows that the knowledge network constructed from Wikipedia can be used to effectively expand the query semantics of image retrieval. It is expected that Wikipedia and digital library can integrate each other's valuable results and best practices to benefit each other.