Document Models for Navigating Digital Libraries
Siegfried Reich, Wernher Behrendt, Christian Eichinger, Martin Schaller (2000): Document Models for Navigating Digital Libraries In: 2000 Kyoto International Conference
Digital libraries allow novel ways of interaction between the users and the resources provided by a (digital) library. Traditional libraries only support a simple pattern of searching the catalogue, retrieving some books, browing through them, and reading the most relevant ones. We propose a new way of looking at the resources of a library: rather than keeping just the books, digital libraries offer a way of also keeping the history of interactions between the resources and their users. In this paper we introduce the concept of portable, stand-alone and living meta objects which assist users in traversing associations between artefacts.
We refer to these objects as AKOs – autonomous knowledge objects. AKOs maintain the complex knowledge structures that already exist between artefacts, they also accept the users‘ annotations, and assist the users in navigation between the artefacts. AKOs are first-class objects themselves, i.e., they can be created, edited, communicated or even traded like any other artefact in a digital library. This way, the library enhances its knowledge value as it is being used.
