A Semi-Automatic Semantic Annotation and Authoring Tool for a Library Help Desk Service

Abstract

This chapter discusses how knowledge technologies can be utilized in creating help desk services on the Semantic Web. To ease the content indexer’s work, we propose semi-automatic semantic annotation of natural language text for annotating question-answer (QA) pairs, and case-based reasoning techniques for finding similar questions. To provide answers matching the content indexer’s and end-user’s information needs, methods for combining case-based reasoning with semantic search, linking, and authoring are proposed. We integrate different data sources by using large ontologies. Techniques to utilize these sources in authoring answers are suggested. A prototype implementation of a real life ontology-based help desk application, based on an existing national library help desk service in Finland, is presented as a proof of concept.