Thesauri : practical guidance for construction

Purpose - With the growing recognition that thesauri aid information retrieval, organisations are beginning to adopt, and in many cases, create thesauri. This paper offers some guidance on the construction process. Design/methodology/approach - An opinion piece with a practical focus, based on recent experiences gleaned from consultancy work. Findings - A number of steps can be taken to ensure any thesaurus under construction is fit for purpose. Due consideration is therefore given to aspects such as term selection, structure and notation, thesauri standards, software and Web display issues, thesauri evaluation and maintenance. This paper also notes that creating new subject schemes from scratch, however attractive, contributes to the plethora of terminologies currently in existence and can limit user searching within particular contexts. The decision to create a "new" thesaurus should therefore be taken carefully and observance of standards is paramount. Practical implications - This paper offers advice to assist practitioners in the development of thesauri. Originality/value - Useful guidance for those practitioners new to the area of thesaurus construction is provided, together with an overview of selected key processes involved in the construction of a thesaurus

Automatic thesaurus construction

Sydney, NS

Theoretical foundations of thesaurus construction

The theoretical foundations of recent work on automatic and semiautomatic thesaurus construction are briefly but critically reviewed, and limitations of current methods of automatic construction of thesaurus are pointed out. Need for a deeper study of the theoretical foundations of thesaurus construction is emphasized and a line of approach to it is suggested

User - Thesaurus Interaction in a Web-Based Database: An Evaluation of Users' Term Selection Behaviour

A major challenge faced by users during the information search and retrieval process is the selection of search terms for query formulation and expansion. Thesauri are recognised as one source of search terms which can assist users in query construction and expansion. As the number of electronic thesauri attached to information retrieval systems has grown, a range of interface facilities and features have been developed to aid users in formulating their queries. The pilot study reported here aimed to explore and evaluate how a thesaurus-enhanced search interface assisted end-users in selecting search terms. Specifically, it focused on the evaluation of users' attitudes toward both the thesaurus and its interface as tools for facilitating search term selection for query expansion. Thesaurusbased searching and browsing behaviours adopted by users while interacting with a thesaurus-enhanced search interface were also examined

Construction of a medical informatics thesaurus

pre-printMedical Informatics needs a specific terminology that reflects the multi-disciplinary nature of the field and can rapidly change as the discipline evolves. Using the four primary methods of thesaurus construction, a group at the University of Missouri- Columbia is developing a thesaurus that meets these criteria and includes both user and literary warrant. The steps in construction include using existing thesauri, medical informatics literature, and the terminology of experts to produce a thesaurus arranged within a hierarchical structure

Technical aspects of Thesaurus Construction in TIPS

This paper describes the work done in the TIPS project about the construction of a thesaurus. This construction is a merge from a compilation of data from several web sources. These data comes from manual work, some data are real thesaurus, other are indexing recommendations. The merge is done with automatically extracted terms from large text corpora. The automatic extraction is based on both syntax and statistics. We present in this paper the way thesaurus are built and the results on Scientific corpus in the context of the TIPS project. This short paper emphasis on some technical aspects

Dialectic Schemes in Thesaurus Creation

This article looks at the logical relationships between the categories that have led to the development of the thesaurus, including the historical origins of thesaurus construction. The research uses the dialectical, logical relationships of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Each step in the dialectic of thesaurus creation includes subjective and objective thought as part of the thesis and antithesis, resolved by the more absolute thinking of the synthesis

Semi-automatic construction of Thesaurus

Describes computer program for generating a thesaurus from Feature Heading of a Bibliographical Record. Also gives a description of computer program for constructing synonym subject string. Programs are written in COBOL. Gives flow charts and a sample of thesaurus output

Domain analysis, an important part of thesaurus construction.

Design and construction of index languages should be based on thorough knowledge and understanding of the environment of the information system and its users. This study investigates a mixed set of methods (group interviews and word association to collect data, content analysis and discourse analysis to analyze data) to evaluate whether these methods together collect the data required for user-oriented thesaurus construction. Based on a case study we find that the three studies together provide the needed domain knowledge to define the role of the thesaurus and design the content. The analysis also provided conceptual knowledge and prepared for the next step, collecting and analyzing concepts and tenns, thus saving resources in the construction process. In sum, the domain study made it possible to design a thesaurus reflecting the work environment and its users