This paper is an attempt to attract attention to the fact that information in digital libraries for science and education (acting as collective memories) should be structured differently than in accordance with the conventional library metaphor. Papers, journals, books, textbooks, courses are not good information entities any longer. Scientists have spent centuries to reach well-defined structures, concepts and theories in the various branches of science. These definitions are more suitable as a guiding principle for information structuring and search in digital libraries as collective memories. Subject mediator technology to support collective memories in a domain of a natural science is discussed. It is assumed that specific, intermediary layer is formed by subject mediators providing a uniform query interface to the multiple data sources to free the user from having to locate the relevant sources, query each one in isolation, and combine manually the information from the different sources. The paper is focused on various aspects of heterogeneous sources uniform representation and contextualization at the mediator level. |
