Aimed at students and professionals within Library and Information Services (LIS), this book is about the power and potential of ontologies to enhance the electronic search process. The book will compare search strategies and results in the current search environment and demonstrate how these could be transformed using ontologies and concept searching. Simple descriptions, visual representations, and examples of ontologies will bring a full understanding of how these concept maps are constructed to enhance retrieval through natural language queries. Readers will gain a sense of how ontologies are currently being used and how they could be applied in the future, encouraging them to think about how their own work and their users' search experiences could be enhanced by the creation of a customized ontology.

Author Biography

Brandy King is the Information Specialist at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston. She is a graduate of Smith College (B.A.) and Simmons College (M.L.I.S.). She is an active member of the Special Libraries Association, and was the recipient of the 2005 SLA Innovation in Technology Award for the creation of a customized media effects ontology used for semantic searching. Ms Reinold is a software consultant for Tessella, Inc. She is a graduate of Emmanuel College (B.A. Mathematics) and Boston Unviersity (M.S. Computer Science). She is also a Springboard Enterprises alumna, a member of Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology, and a member of the Association of Computing Machinery. Ms Reinold has extensive experience in software development and methodologies including work on ontologies and semantic search.