SIMILE

For other uses, see simile (disambiguation).

SIMILE was a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project ran from 2003 to August 2008. It focused on developing tools to increase the interoperability of disparate digital collections, much of SIMILE's technical focus is oriented towards Semantic Web technology and standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF).

History

SIMILE stands for Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments. It was born out of DSpace, the open source system digital repository for scholarly materials developed at MIT. DSpace, which is now used at a number of research institutions, archives scholarly publications and makes them accessible. The aim of DSpace is to make it possible to federate the collections of the various holding libraries, avoiding the entombment of the contents of each DL within its individual research community. In order to grow and enable its users to find research material which has been described in various domain-specific ways, DSpace needs the ability to support metadata schemas beyond Dublin Core. The challenge for DSpace and other digital libraries is to assist communities in dealing with different schemes, vocabularies, ontologies and metadata and to provide research services to their users.

SIMILE projects

Main article: List of SIMILE projects

See also

• Haystack, a related project from the MIT which mostly concentrates on personal information management
• Freebase

References

• Butler, Mark H., Gilbert, John, Seaborne, Andy, Smathers, Kevin 2004, Data conversion, extraction and record linkage using XML and RDF tools in Project SIMILE. Digital Media Systems Laboratories HP Laboratories, Bristol, United Kingdom.
• Huynh, D., Mazzocchi, S., & Karger, D. Piggy Bank: experience the semantic web inside your web browser, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, MA.
• Mazzocchi, S., Garland, S. & Lee, R. 2005, SIMILE: practical metadata for the semantic web, O'Reilly xml.com, 26 Jan.
• Project SIMILE: Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments 2005, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July, Massachusetts, United States.

External links

• SIMILE Project
• An independent "spin-off" from the SIMILE project
• W3C Semantic Web Activity

Related

• DSpace. Digital repository system which archives and makes accessible digital research material.