SLUBsemantics for TUD Excellence

The Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) has released the first version of its state of the art multilingual semantic search machine SLUBsemantics.

In the first phase of its development, out of the 65 million documents of SLUB Dresden, SLUBsemantics indexes 4 million printed and electronic titles in the local holdings in a brand new way. The search technology has been in development since March 2011 with the cooperation of Avantgarde Labs, a start-up company of TUD. It uses the knowledge structures of the highly successful online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and its freely accessible data.

SLUBsemantics recognizes connections between content and search terms by analyzing Wikipedia’s information network and thus it can make informed suggestions about potentially relevant content within the SLUB catalogue. The search technology currently understands queries in German, English, and Polish with more languages to follow.

A more detailed explanation of how the new searching tool works is available at www.slub-dresden.de/SLUBsemantics.