UML for the conceptual web

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of unified modelling language (UML) based ontologies to develop a faceted model to facilitate semantic browsing and searching in digital libraries. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is to understand the way information gets logically organised in the human mind in terms of mutually defined concepts. Ontologies will be used to model the semantic structure of individual information sources using the faceted classification schema of Dr S.R. Ranganathan, though with improvisation to accommodate new concepts relating to digital resources. Findings – UML can be the best option for knowledge representation if the target system is a digital library where the required type of reasoning about ontologies is more in terms of answering specific and specialised questions. Here, ontologies can be used to facilitate a distributed information retrieval system. Originality/value – The proposed model will not only facilitate semantic searching using UML concept maps but will also enable domain experts, even those with little coding expertise, to build ontologies for their resources while submitting their documents to the digital library.