Sharing Knowledge: Scientific Communication - SSOAR

48 Klaus Hahn
Abstract
The advancement of digital library systems during the last years led to a so far
unknown integration of scientific literature research: traditional borders between
the established domain-specific literature databases blur today.
An integrated project of Germany-based information suppliers within three
scientific disciplines (Education: German Institute for International Educational
Research, Frankfurt/Main; Social Sciences: Information Center for the Social
Sciences, Bonn; Psychology: Center for Psychological Information and Documentation,
Trier) works for some time now towards offering to the scientific
public one integrated front-end as an entrance to all of their data, ranging from
simple bibliographic meta-data to complete on-line papers. So-called „Sondersammelgebietsbibliotheken“
of the three domains are responsible for acquiring
and licensing of magazine articles and original papers. The project is funded by
the „Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)“ and the „Deutsche
Forschungs-Gemeinschaft (DFG)“.
An integration of these distributed databases tries to offer a comfortable and
efficient expansion of a user’s original, single-database search. To this end the
already established knowledge structures within the domain-specific databases
(so-called „Inhaltserschließung“) are to be used, which comprise thesauri and
classifications. Methods are under development to avoid the semantic ambiguities
which would surely arise would search terms of one domain be propagated
to another one without adequate transformation. This so-called Problem of Semantic
Heterogeneity is not only related to domain-specific thesauri but arises
e.g. also during the translation of technical terms.
The goal is to try to ensure the stability of a given semantic context on the one
hand by intellectually constructed cross-concordances built between two thesauri,
on the other hand by correlation-based mappings, which use parallel corpora
in order to obtain a concordance measure.
Problemstellung: Information Retrieval und Meta-Daten
Die traditionelle wissenschaftliche Recherche muss sich heute der Herausforderung
durch die zwar chaotische, aber auch durchaus integrative Präsenz des Internet
stellen. War es bislang üblich, wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen vornehmlich
in darauf spezialisierten, verstreut aufgebauten Datenbanken mit jeweils
eigener Zugangslogik zu suchen, so hat sich inzwischen - durch das starke
Anwachsen wissenschaftlicher Publikationen einerseits und die explosionsartige
Vermehrung so genannter grauer Literatur andererseits - das globale Durchstöbern
des Internet als durchaus fruchtbar erwiesen, wobei sich die Ergebnisse