Thesaurus Design

A seminar for learning how to create thesauri [1]
- Materials from the seminar [2]

The Challenges of Developing Multi-lingual Content Structures [3]

Thesaurus principles and practice

http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/thesprin.htm

[Thesaurus Design for Semantic Information Management] – Bella Hass Weinberg’s annual seminar in NYC?

Thesaurus Design Tools

Thesaurus software

http://www.a-k-a.com.au – a.k.a.® Thesaurus Software

http://www.multites.com

http://www.termtree.com.au

[Comparison of thesaurus management software for PCs]

You might want to try the listing of thesaurus software at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne – Fachhochschule Köln (Germany). The site is available in German as well as in English. Moreover, the page was updated in July 2002.

Check the link to THeW/THeW32? (Freeware for Windows) by Timothy C. Craven (second before last entry on the above page)–nice tool:

http://publish.uwo.ca/~craven/freeware.htm

— ThomasZschocke?

Here are two resources I had used to locate thesaurus development & management tools:

American Society of Indexers Thesaurus Software

http://www.asindexing.org/site/thessoft.shtml

Willpower Information: Software for Building and Editing Thesauri

http://www.willpowerinfo.co.uk/thessoft.htm

Not technically for thesauri…

Wordmap Taxonomy Management System

http://www.wordmap.com/products_library.html

InterOperability

It doesn’t seem like there’s one tool that will allow you to manage a controlled vocabulary and integrate it with other systems (besides exporting it). Another option is to manage the vocabulary inside another system. Verity for example provides a tool to manage a taxonomy to use with their search system. Does anyone know if these search engine-centric tools can interoperate with other systems (e.g. a database or middleware)? – VictorLombardi

Later…I’ve heard of someone using MultiTes? to export a thesaurus which is then used as 1) keywords for a CMS and 2) synonyms for search engine.

I suppose if we used a common format – like an XML language – we could store a thesaurus in one place and other systems could access it. Everyone would have to agree to read a common XML format – that doesn’t seem unreasonable. Might be more realistic and easier to implement than having every application access a database, though that is Oracle’s data-centric view of application integration.

Thesaurus in RDF: http://ceres.ca.gov/thesaurus/ and http://ceres.ca.gov/thesaurus/RDF.html

The Term Tree thesaurus software (see link above) has available an API to allow just such interoperability. This is being used with Metabrowser, a web browser for metadata, a CMSsystem soon to be released in Europe, the Document Workbench EDRMS? system and within many other organisations for their custom applications. The returned result sets are XMLso may be used in whatever manner the user requires.

Also see the ZTHES? thesaurus standard in XML: http://zthes.z3950.org/xml/index.html