A Holistic Ontology for Digital Libraries

Overcoming the limitations of the record-based approach to library information by graph-based representations driven by ontologies may enable advanced support by AI and allow to expand the realm of the descriptions from the traditional formal metadata in several directions. An application domain that heavily relies on libraries and may take enormous advantage from this approach is education. In fact, an educational ontology is at the core of the KEPLAIR project aimed at developing a learner-centered educational environment. This paper describes our effort in this direction, and specifically how we seamlessly extended a core ontology based on the conceptual models of library data proposed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) so that it is aligned with standard educational data models, such as the IEEE LOM, OERschema, and IntelLEO. The alignment resulted in a cross-fertilization of the two domains, and allowed us to better understand them and to find and resolve subtle issues in the aligned resources.