The Realization Of Semantic Interoperability In Digital Library

With the Semantic Web activity springing up, "semantics" comes to be a more and more important and pivotal element to change Internet which is our information communication environment. And "semantic interoperability", as a kind of high-level interoperability and the imperative requirement of information users, have attracted more and more eyes of researchers and web developers, because "semantic interoperability" can make the meaning of information exchange without limit not only among people and people, but also among machine and people, machine and machine, information systems and systems. This means the machine will hold intelligence that only the human being currently hold. Furthermore, within the technology framework of Semantic Web, it is possible to realize semantic interoperability. Accordingly, Digital Library, which aims to provide the services of knowledge exchanging, haring and long term preservation and whose mission is resolve the interoperability problems of information systems, must have the function of semantic interoperability. This is the obligatory job to do for the exsisting and development of Digital Library because of the serious requirement of users. And with the rapid increasing of information on the web and information systems in the distributed environment, semantic interoperability will be the core function of Digital Library.The paper tries to explore ways and means to resolve the semantic interoperability problems of Digital Library on the base of having difined the concept about semantic interoperability, discussed the great meaning of semantic interoperability for Digital Library, emphasized the functions of metadata and ontology for semantic interoperability, and analyses a typical case of Chinese Cultural Celebrities' Manuscript Library.