Leesindex

Leesindex is a bibliographic indexing framework designed to enhance information retrieval in digital libraries and research repositories. It integrates traditional keyword indexing with semantic relationships among concepts, entities, and authors to improve relevance and disambiguation in search results. The system is designed to support multilingual collections and cross-disciplinary access.

The concept emerged from scholarly work on semantic indexing in the early 2010s, with prototypes developed through collaborations among information science researchers. Leesindex builds on established indexing and ontology techniques, combining lexical, conceptual, and relational data to support advanced queries and more precise results in large collections.

Architecturally, Leesindex comprises three layers: a lexical index that stores terms and variants; a conceptual index that links terms to domain concepts via a lightweight ontology; and a relationship graph that captures connections between authors, works, subjects, and venues. During search, user queries are parsed into lexical components, disambiguated against the concept graph, and re-ranked using context signals, proximity relations, and feedback loops.

The framework uses standards such as SKOS for thesauri and RDF/OWL for data exchange, promoting interoperability with other library systems and data sources. It supports faceted search, semantic expansion, and provenance tracking of indexing decisions, enabling transparency in how results are retrieved and ranked.

Leesindex is applied in digital libraries, institutional repositories, and academic search engines to improve precision, recall, and user satisfaction, particularly for polysemous terms and cross-disciplinary subjects. Adoption requires investment in indexing workflows and curator training, but proponents argue it offers more meaningful retrieval and better long-term interoperability than keyword-only approaches.