Beyond information searching and browsing: acquiring knowledge from digital libraries

As one of the most complex and advanced forms of Internet information systems, digital libraries serve as an increasingly important channel to a vast array of information sources and services. However, from the standpoint of satisfying human’s information needs, the current digital library systems suffer from the following two shortcomings: (i) inadequate strategic level cognition support; (ii) inadequate knowledge sharing facilities. In this paper, we introduce a two-layered digital library architecture to support different levels of human cognitive acts. The model moves beyond simple information searching and browsing across multiple repositories, to inquiry of knowledge. To address users’ high-order cognitive requests, we propose an information space, consisting of a knowledge subspace and a document subspace. A formal description of the knowledge subspace for knowledge sharing and dissemination, as well as mechanisms for constructing the two subspaces, are particularly discussed. Such an enhanced information space extends the traditional role of digital libraries as information provider to information & knowledge provider. Some distinguished features in comparison with the traditional knowledge-based systems are also discussed in the paper.