The Semantic Web reached LA Referencia
LA Referencia is already integrated to Intelligo, a browser of large volumes of documents of Ibero-American repositories where users can experience a search path not only associated to final documents, but also to the deployment of concepts derived from several information sources and its emergent relationships. This trend, called semantic web, allows network visualization between connected information.
Thus, the metadata of national nodes from nine Latin-American countries integrated to LA Referencia, pass in turn to be explored by Intelligo, from where conceptual maps are derived that relate themes, authors and editors from the region, offering a wider view of what is happening in the regional research.
This novel search engine gives an aggregated value to LA Referencia, whose objectives are to consolidate optimized services from the federated network of Latin American repositories. The integration of LA Referencia to the semantic search engine Intelligo is part of an agreement signed in November 2012 by the Organization of American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) and RedCLARA, with the goal to complement efforts to foster scientific visibility of the region.
For Alberto Cabezas, LA Referencia executive secretary, this experience constitutes a relevant development that allows users new mechanisms for browsing and searching, as well as opportunities to analyze and improve the quality of the information produced. “This shows that it is quite feasible the development of innovative services from within the region. With this we are also answering to LA Referencia objectives, since political authorities from the member countries have indicated the need to build a federated network of repositories with value-added services.”
Intelligo has been driven by the OEI and has four released versions with new optimizations that progressively have offered a friendly interface for users who want more than scientific documents. Intelligo also uses as information source, other Ibero-American collections as SciELO and REDALYC, in such a way that the concepts and data from the documents derived from LA Referencia will also be related to this information sources, expanding the thematic spectrum in the region.
