A bilingual digital library for academic and entrepreneurial knowledge management

Purpose - A generic knowledge management process of organization, storage and retrieval of knowledge can suitably be fitted in a digital library. In the digital and knowledge age digital libraries can be used in knowledge management to handle intellectual assets and support knowledge creation. A multilingual digital library either stores content in more than one language or provides multilingual query access to monolingual content. In Serbia 18 of 308 scientific journals regularly published are bilingual, with papers simultaneously being in English and Serbian. Bilingual publication of results of international projects is also an increasingly frequent practice. In this paper we present a publicly available multilingual digital library named Biblisa, developed for management, search and the browsing of aligned bilingual text collections. Design/methodology/approach - The approach to the development of the presented digital library was to store its content in a NoSQL-database, with a web tool to enable the use of rich information in the stored text collections. The library content originates from various bilingual sources, with all documents aligned at the sentence level and provided with metadata. In designing Biblisa special attention was given to its component that offers language support, based on bilingual lexical resources and tools, to various multilingual aspects of this library. Originality/value - Users have a high level of flexibility in searching the library content: they can search the library using metadata, or perform full-text search by keywords of their choice. Furthermore, the user's original query, issued in Serbian or English, can be expanded to the other language, both morphologically and semantically. Thus it offers a novel access to digital content to its users. In addition to that, Biblisa presents an original approach to successful combining of several components: Lexical resources, Library content, Web services and Web interface. Practical implications-Digital library users often need to transform information access into knowledge creation. To that end, Biblisa offers numerous documents from several scientific journals and projects covering various domains. Metadata and full-text search are available within a user-friendly platform, with the possibility for a very high level of search refinement. Biblisa also supports the analysis of concepts and concept structures, identifying terms assigned to concepts, and establishing relations between terms in English and Serbian, which makes it a valuable tool for terminological research.