Advanced search and browsing in digital libraries

In the past the main source of reliable information were libraries. Nowadays, the Web is more and more assuming the role of a major information provider. But the move from the well organized libraries to unsupervised and unstructured Internet is causing serious problems. Although it should be possible to find almost anything on the Internet, very often one is unable to find the needle in the haystack. In this paper we present JeromeDL a digital library with semantics. JeromeDL uses Semantic Web technologies together with standard bibliographic description formats to improve efficiency and usability of the searching and browsing process. We show how the DublinCore and FOAF vocabularies work together with well known bibliographic formats like the MARC21 and BibTEX to achieve better search results. Furthermore, FOAFRealm, an infrastructure introduced to handle a users profile, provides means to share bookmarks and annotations of the resources within a network of friends. We discuss how this information is used in the search process within JeromeDL.