Zeitschrift für Computertechnik und Informationstechnologie

Building Ontology For Library Management System Using Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme

Amil Rohani Dar and Sheeba Razzaq

The internet is playing a very important role in communication and sharing knowledge today. Users of the Internet use web for different kinds of tasks. The current web mostly restricts processing of information to manual keyword searching and becomes the reason for irrelevant information retrieval. This problem can be overcome by using semantic web. Semantic web is intelligent and meaningful web. It describes the things in a way that the computer can understand. Ontology plays a vital role in achieving goal of semantic web i.e. how to use and reuse knowledge that can be communicated across applications systems. For the development of ontology, the most important thing is classes and the resulting class and subclass relationships. Classification schemes have been used persistently to represent various kinds of human knowledge. Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme provides list of classes for all kind of books. It was invented by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. Currently, this scheme is used by most of libraries in the world. In our work we are extracting the classes from DDC scheme for building ontology and converting the classes into ontology. We developed a hierarchical structure comprised of a class-subclass relationship as well as relation among hierarchy levels and properties. This paper presents the potential of ontologies applicable to semantic web. The proposed ontology has been used to develop a library management system (LMS) and produce excellent results in terms of efficiency and ease of use.