Hsueh-hua Chen

The design of metadata for the Digital Museum Initiative in Taiwan

Metadata plays a crucial role in a digital library/museum environment. However, the development of metadata is not an easy task. Its formulation starts with analysing the attributes of collections as well as understanding the user information needs and information seeking behaviour. The issue of interoperability also needs to be considered in terms of both semantics and syntax. This paper discusses issues related to the development of metadata in Taiwan. It describes the development process of a Chinese metadata system, Metadata Interchange for Chinese Information (MICI), and an XML/metadata management system, Metalogy. Both were developed under the Digital Museum Initiative sponsored by the National Science Council of Taiwan.

EDUCATING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONALS IN THE ERA OF KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

The era of knowledge economy has arrived, and knowledge has become a key resource for enterprises. How to keep creating and using new knowledge has become an important concern for modern business administration. How to manage knowledge efficiently and effectively will become a crucial issue in future. However, owing to differences in educational backgrounds, people may have different perspectives on knowledge management (KM), and so the effectiveness of KM may not be maximized owing to lack of integration. In view of this, the Departments of Library and Information Science, Business Administration, Information Management, and Computer Science and Information Engineering of the National Taiwan University put together a KM Curriculum Program that seeks to educate and train all-round KM professionals. This paper begins with the proposition that KM will be the focus of business administration in the 21st century, followed by the need to train interdisciplinary KM professionals and create channels for such training. Lastly, it takes KM Curriculum Program, NTU as a sample to explain the ideas behind its education and training. Further, by sharing experiences, we hope to motivate other colleges and universities to draw up similar programs to train skilled KM professionals and to improve Taiwans competitiveness in the business world.

Mapping multilingual lexical semantics for knowledge organization systems

Purpose – The study aims to investigate, through mapping analysis, the operation of knowledge organization systems (KOS) in different languages (English and Chinese), the types of term equivalence and the degree of similarity between different conceptual structures, and issues related thereto.Design/methodology/approach – Terms are selected from the Art & Architecture Thesaurus developed by Getty Research Institute in the USA (source language) and the National Palace Museum in Taiwan participating in Taiwan e‐Learning and Digital Archives Program (target language). In respect of data analysis, mapping analysis and content analysis are both adopted.Findings – Among the six types of term equivalence, “exact equivalence” appears most frequently. The degree of similarity between different conceptual structures can be divided into four types: similar structure, transferring part of the structure of source language into the system of target language by modeling; similar structure, but the structure of source la...

Building an open archive union catalog for digital archives

Purpose – In January 2002, the National Science Council of Taiwan launched a National Digital Archives Program (NDAP) and has proceeded with the implementation of a system related to the open archives initiative (OAI) framework. This paper aims to introduce the protocol and the prototype system of the project.Design/methodology/approach – A general review of the project.Findings – The OAI interoperability framework has received much attention from scholars of library and information sciences. In Europe and North America, many academic organizations and universities have undertaken theoretical studies, system design, and implementation of the OAI framework. In January 2002, the National Science Council of Taiwan launched a NDAP, and the institutional project of the National Taiwan University is one of its institutional projects. Now, the project has proceeded with the implementation of a system related to the OAI framework.Originality/value – Provides information of value to information professionals.

The working environment and changing role of corporate librarians in Taiwan

Influenced by the concept of a Knowledge Economy, knowledge management (KM) has been receiving a lot of attention in the field of business administration recently. In the field of Library and Information Science, corporate librarians working in the information centers are mostly affected by KM either in their working environment or in their daily operations role. Headed by the Special Library Association (SLA), a series of studies about the working environment and the changing role of corporate librarians in the last 10 years had been done in the United States. Due to differences in politics, economics, and cultures between Taiwan and Western countries, the organizational structure and corporate culture of business is not the same. Therefore, local studies on similar topics are needed. Our purpose in this study is to explore the influence of knowledge management on the working environment and the changing roles of corporate librarians in Taiwan.

Alignment of conceptual structures in controlled vocabularies in the domain of Chinese art: a discussion of issues and patterns

In any effort that involves multilingual KOS, the language and cultural variants bring a great degree of complexity, especially when perspectives of different cultures need to be integrated. This paper attempts to explore, within the domain of Chinese art, the interoperability of multilingual/multi-cultural vocabularies by analyzing the issues of aligning the conceptual structures of Chinese and English terminology in the controlled vocabularies observed in our Chinese AAT-Taiwan Project (2010-present). The paper addresses the issues related to the conceptual structures of the concepts for Chinese art in the National Palace Museum (NPM) Vocabulary and Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). The paper presents four patterns found in the effort of achieving semantic interoperability and shares a set of models that have been used to handle various situations. The findings help the understanding of the semantic interoperability of multilingual KOS, especially when dealing with cultural-related concepts that cannot be exactly aligned in vocabularies due to discrepancies in the conceptual structures.

A case study for multilingual support: applying the AAT-thesaurus to TELDAP's multilingual project

The translation of cultural-laden words has been a formidable project. This paper discusses how AAT-Thesaurus, with its classification of semantic equivalence and carefully structured terms, helps the Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program (TELDAP) conquer the difficulty of untranslatability.

Methodologies for multilingual information integration in the domain of Chinese art

In this paper, we report on methodologies through the two multilingualized research projects. We discuss a proposed methodological framework for Chinese-English interoperability between the respective thesauri, including four main modules: Translation, Mapping, Localization, and Creation. We also discuss four steps involved in building English metadata: Mapping, Selection, Translation, and Control Vocabulary. In addition, the paper also looks into key issues faced by the two projects, including the varying degrees of semantic equivalence between Chinese and English terms, metadata translation, and metadata quality.

The development of digital library projects in taiwan

The development of the national level digital library projects in Taiwan began in 1998. The initiate project – Digital Museum Project (DMP, 1998~2001), sponsored by the National Science Council (NSC), included several topic-based projects and technical support projects. The outcomes of DMP was quite successful, however, the scale and budget (only

Building an OAI-Based Union Catalog for the National Digital Archives Program in Taiwan

130 million NTD, ca. US