Steps towards enhancing the user experience in accessing digital libraries

The advent of the Web has driven cultural institutions to publish digital representations of their assets online. The main problem of the cultural Web sites, and of their back-end Digital Libraries (DLs), is the limitation of the informative services offered to the user. DLs offer simple search functionalities which return a list of the information objects contained in the DL. No semantic relation among the returned objects is usually reported which can help the user in obtaining a more complete knowledge on the subject of the research. The introduction of the Semantic Web, and in particular of the Linked Data, has the potential of improving the search functionalities of DLs. Many cultural institutions have represented their metadata into formal descriptions encoded by means of formal languages such as RDF and OWL. Our study aims at exploiting the representations of the semantics of the objects contained in the new generation DLs in the in order to introduce a new search functionality. As output of a query, the new search functionality does not return just a list of objects but it presents a narrative, based on the objects of the library that are relevant to the query and on a set of semantic relations that connect these objects into something meaningful to the user. The paper presents the first theoretical achievements on a model for representing narratives. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.