6th Dr. T.B. Rajashekar Memorial Lecture : “Role of LIS in Semantic Web Technology”

Topic: Role of LIS in Semantic Web Technology

Speaker: Prof. ARD Prasad, Head, Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC) Indian Statistical Institute

Venue: NCSI Seminar Hall, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Date & Time: 10/06/2021 at 6 PM

Sixth Dr. TB Rajashekar Memorial lecture held on Friday 10th June 2011 at NCSI seminar hall, IISc, Bangalore. It was jointly organized by NCSI and NCSI-Net, IISc, Bangalore. There was very good and encouraging response from the LIS professional community for the lecture.

The event was set in motion with Dr. Francis Jayakanth of NCSI welcoming the well-attended gathering. He gave a brief life sketch of late Dr. TBR emphasizing on TBR’s contributions and initiatives while he served at NCSI. Dr. Francis Jayakanth introduced presiding guest of the talk Dr. IRN Goudar, Advisor, Mysore University Library, Mysore. Dr. IRN Goudar briefed about his association with Dr. TB Rajashekar from their DRTC Course where both were classmates. He expressed his wish to have two pioneers of modern LIS professionals Dr. TBR and Prof ARD on the same dais with debating on the issues with their own perspectives, but unfortunately it didn’t happen because of untimely demise of Dr. TBR. Dr. IRN Gouder gave glimpse and the necessity of Semantic Web in the present day Internet. He introduced Prof. ARD Prasad and requested him to deliver talk.

Prof. ARD Prasad began the lecture by highlighting the contributions of Dr. TBR to the LIS profession and his role in making NCSI Training program, best of its kind in the nation. He also felt that institution like IISc should have continued such training program to fill the void in the LIS profession. Lecture was typical Prof. ARD style and was very interactive and informal. He started his talk by telling how he came to LIS profession after studying Masters in Philosophy. According to the speaker, today search engines retrieve lot of noise, which is because of ineffective mechanism of indexing the web pages. Many pit fall of the present of the web are statics HTML pages, dynamic web pages wrap information in HTML, web pages are retrieved from structured databases, become unstructured in HTML etc,. In essence problem of the web is that much of the data/information is meant for human understanding and not machine processable, and challenge lies is How to make web information/data machine processable. Solution for this may be Metadata (cataloguing)and ontologies (classifications) which are librarian tools.

He spoke about context sensitive search, tools of sementics web like RDF, OWL/SKOS, FOAF, Dublin Core etc,. At the end of his talk he highlighted the role of LIS professionals in semantic web environment and DRTC role in “Living Knowledge” project funded by European Commission and its expected outcome. At the end audience clarified their doubts and presiding guest concluded with presidential remarks and thanking the speaker for wonderful lecture. Mr. Shivaram BS proposed vote of thanks.