Slubsemantics - Multilinguale semantische suche

This is Sara. Sara just began her studies and is trying to figure out the fastest way to find books in the online catalog of the SLUB Dresden. It’s not always easy to find things in libraries. The SLUB Dresden has over eight million resources, all of which can now be found with just a few mouse clicks! However, conventional search methods require specific keywords and demand a lot of prior knowledge from the user. The new SLUBsemantics is different. SLUBsemantics is a theme-oriented search that allows Sara to discover relevant books, as well as other types of media, which she probably wouldn’t have found with a conventional search in just a few clicks. The system uses the links of the entire knowledge base of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and can thus better understand queries. This sounds interesting, so Sarah wants to try this new system for herself. She wonders if there are actually books or other media resources about the SLUB Dresden itself. So, she types the query “SLUB Dresden” into the search field and finds a multitude of results. Sarah wants to filter these results a bit more, so she clicks on the term on the results tree that matches her search criteria the closest: culture. Then she clicks on “Libraries” and finds the option “SLUB Dresden”. The numbers behind the terms display how many books are in the category. At the top, there is now a branch for the SLUB building, which only contains one book. With one more click, she sees the title of the book, which turns out to be a city guide to contemporary architecture. The second branch contains books about the SLUB’s Book Museum. This is a surprise to Sarah, who didn’t even know that there was a book museum in the SLUB! Now Sarah wants to show this search to her friend Marta. This is Marta. Marta is from Warsaw and is studying psychology in Dresden. Sometimes she thinks of search terms in her native language first, so she types the Polish word for “luck” into the search field. SLUBsemantics automatically recognizes that it is a Polish word. If the language recognition isn’t right at first, it can also be set manually. In the SLUB catalog, there are German and English books about the topic of luck. SLUBsemantics is multi-lingual. At the moment, German, English, and Polish are available and more languages are coming soon. Another feature is the graphical search. For example, if you type in the name of the American director Quentin Tarantino, you can filter the results down to his films very quickly by clicking on the branches “Everyday culture” and “Film”. SLUBsemantics is intelligent search technology that uses Wikipedia’s vast network of information to understand search queries. The branched trees correspond to Wikipedia’s system of categories. This new system for searching is particularly useful for browsing and discovering new things, especially when one is looking for information about a certain topic, as opposed to looking for a specific book. The system is also multi-lingual and avoids multiple searches with similar terms because the system recognizes many similar terms. Another strength of this search is that you always make more surprising and relevant discoveries! SLUBsemantics is supposed to be expanded in the future and will eventually be developed into a one-of-a-kind search tool. Sarah, Marta, and the SLUB hope you have lots of fun browsing and discovering and they look forward to your feedback and suggestions!