A semantic web enabled integrated search service for electronic theses and dissertations / Hesamedin Hakimjavadi

In recent years, Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are becoming an integral part of Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, multiplicity of data providers, as well as the variety of software solutions, standards, and protocols utilized for running these repositories, has led to some complexity in integration of ETD resources. Almost all of current data integration methods involve combining resources residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of these data. Applying these methods in the domain of digital libraries led to development of a number of specialized integration methods (e.g. metadata harvesting, metadata aggregation, etc.) as well as some interoperability protocols (e.g. OAI-PMH, SWORD, z39.50, etc.). Nevertheless, this research unveiled that none of these methods and standards are capable of integrating ETD resources on the semantic level. In this study, 10 metadata integration methods and 8 interoperability protocols were evaluated from both theoretical and practical perspectives. For this purpose, we conducted two surveys (among 266 ETD archives and 136 ETD experts), and 2 comparative studies (among 15 IRs software solutions and 10 metadata integration methods). The results of the surveys indicated that the OAI-PMH is the most widely adopted interoperability protocols among ETD archives and IR software providers. On the other hand, the evaluation of metadata integration methods depicted that the metadata harvesting method is not capable of providing higher level of integration among ETD resources. Based on these results, a semantic web-based framework namely ETD Integrating System was designed. The framework consists of 5 steps, for each step a specific software tool was developed, so that together formed an information workflow system.