Timo Borst

timo_borst

Invited Speaker

Dr. Timo Borst, Director of Innovative Information Systems and Publication Technologies (IIPT) at the German National Library for Economics (ZBW), Germany

Dr. Timo Borst has agreed to deliver an invited speech on “Serving users with content in a web-based environment – a new challenge for information providers” at IMCW2014. Dr. Borst’s work focuses on information retrieval (IR), repositories for scientific information, publication technologies and the use of ontologies and thesauri in library applications. He studied Computer Science (Technical University of Berlin) and Political Science (Free University Berlin and the University of Marburg) and earned his PhD degree in 2004. Dr. Borst worked in industry as a project manager and concept developer in the fields of electronic publishing and e-government and has been the Head of Department of IIPT at the ZBW since 2007.

Title: “Serving users with content in a web-based environment – a new challenge for information providers”

Abstract. For centuries, information providers like libraries got used to the situation of information pull, meaning that information needs where served at a certain local place, e.g. a library or documentation center. With the conception and emergence of the World Wide Web as a global information space, this situation has dramatically changed: nowadays, users have adjusted to the fact that any relevant information is on hand, regardless if they change their location or device. Taking this for granted, traditional information providers have lost their status as a primary and unique source for information and knowledge. Instead, they are forced to compete with current popular information hubs like search engines and social networks.

With this situation in mind, the talk will outline approaches towards providing relevant and context-aware information in a web-based environment without necessarily setting up a new information gateway in the shape of a portal or website. Rather, the basic idea is to expose information in a machine readable way to be integrated or injected into existing information platforms or tools. To illustrate this generic approach, we consider three examples: First, a browser plugin for querying and displaying related content from another information provider. Second, measures taken in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for better indexing by Google Scholar. And finally, we consider providing information from a thesaurus for supporting both querying and indexing with search terms in document and content management platforms.

The talk tries to pinpoint to the fact that, apart from its manifold facets, information management nowadays also means to encode, expose and access information in machine readable formats and via Application Program Interfaces (API) to be smoothly integrated into existing or prevailing information environments.