Despite the dissemination of user-friendly search engines which allow for the retrieval of scientific information in computer networks, researchers do not always obtain expected results in a simple and efficient manner. There is increasingly evidence that the scientific community, in particular Social and Humanities researchers, finds it difficult to accurately retrieve their information requirements through the Web. Some of the difficulties are magnified by the fact that the Web organization is not based on commonly adopted standards. Therefore one needs to gather, organize and better disseminate the freely available scientific information on the Web through the use of open standards in digital libraries. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is one important standard from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In our talk we introduce some of the standards aiming to better understand how digital library could benefits from them.

The number of potential research resources (namely articles, reports, presentations, curse notes, etc.) significantly grows on a daily basis, however in a quite poor organization format given the Web’s inherent characteristics. As a consequence, researchers are exposed to informational overload and are required to spend considerable amounts of time to eventually retrieve useful information. This leads to a non-efficient deployment of time and efforts. This issue has motivated many research groups to investigate and to propose tools that aim to assist the scientific communities in (i) coordination of research efforts;(ii) improvement in overall satisfaction in retrieving their information needs;(iii) avoiding the costs related to poor process performance;(iv) improving the investment return in science and technology programs. In this context, we propose that digital library research in the semantic web context indeed provides significant contribution towards a more efficient organization of scientific contents in the Web.