Getting the (Semantic) Sense out of a User Query || UBLabs

The BIOfid Semantic Search Within the BIOfid-project, we create a semantic search portal (hereafter “BIOfid portal”) to help our users to access legacy biodiversity literature more easily. Hence, since the BIOfid portal has a deeper “understanding” of both the texts and the included species, it allows the users to get more relevant documents. Moreover, the BIOfid portal interprets the user query and transform it ad hoc into a graph database query, to learn more about their intention.

Strolling through library shelves on graphs‘ edges || UBLabs

Strolling through library shelves on graphs' edges During development of the new African Studies Library online portal, I was faced with the task to implement an authority based search system. Without a more detailed specification, I first had to figure out, what that could be and how to implement it. The authority data to be used were datasets provided by the German “Gemeinsame Normdatei”, GND for short. That is all fine and well, but nobody would enter GND-Identifiers like https://d-nb.

CPU-intensive Python Web Backends with asyncio and multiprocessing, Part I || UBLabs

Python, popular though it is, has a few well-known weaknesses. One of the most well known among serious users of the language is the lack of multicore support for in-process threads. This is because CPython, Python’s standard implementation has a global interpreter lock (often referred to as the GIL). The GIL locks each instance of the interpreter to a single core—a common approach to avoid race conditions in the implementation of language interpreters.

FIDs at the ubffm || UBLabs

About this Blog The University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg (UB JCS) in Frankfurt am Main hosts several "Specialised Information Services" (FID) who jointly maintain this blog. We, the FID IT team, are writing about technical challenges that we face in our daily work. You can contact us via ublabs@ub.uni-frankfurt.de and visit us on GitHub : https://github.com/ubffm. Specialised Information Services at UB JCS FID African Studies FID Biodiversity Research (BIOfid) FID Comparative Literature Studies (avldigital) FID German Studies (Germanistik im Netz) FID Jewish Studies FID Linguistics FID Performing Arts Visit the UB JCS’s FID info page (in German): https://www.