Social network technologies for semantic linking of information objects in scientific digital library

In the last decade, scientific digital libraries were traditionally used for publishing research results and for enabling wide open access to them. Functional capabilities of digital libraries can be extended by offering users the opportunity of linking information objects of the library and providing for created linkages explicitly defined semantics based on a given ontology. Such an activity of users, which is peculiar to social networks, motivated by different reasons, and carried out on their own initiative, results in the dynamic semantic structure of the digital library content. In the environment of such a kind of a social network, certain new forms of scientific activities become possible and data sources can be created that provide more information for scientometric researches as compared to presently available ones. In this paper, we propose an approach for creating such networks and discuss results of its implementation in the Socionet environment; the Socionet is a large-scale online information space that covers information resources of a number of scientific, educational, etc. organizations.