Exchanging Data from Institutional Repositories to the Semantic Web

Internet and semantic web technologies have enabled academics to find online research materials with increasing speed and accuracy. They have enabled academics to make connections with each other. Whereas institutional repositories (IRs) are often built to serve a specific institution’s community of users. Mostly existing IRs are using relational database schema for maintaining the metadata of their digital contents. They might need to interact with other information systems that build to manage institutional research activities. Thus it is crucial to provide interoperability and integration mechanisms to bridge the gap between the semantic web and relational database worlds. To process the data in semantic context a relational database is transformed into ontology. The use of semantic web technologies in integrating the different IRs metadata enable ontology-facilitated sharing and reuse of learning resources. They provide users access to a web of content which might otherwise require discovering and exploring multiple websites or IRs.