Publication

Role of thesauri in a scientific organisation

Dario Rodighiero
2009
Conference paper
Abstract

We aim to describe the mediation language between users and indexers in a document retrieval system for a big scientific community intimately related to European Union policies. We assume that this mediation is played by thesauri: sets of indexes apparently coordinating the possible searches by means of term-to-term relations like NT, RT and so on. While persons-to-terms relations are consequent to the use of thesauri for indexing and retrieval, person-to-person relations are embodied into a thesaurus via the implicit repre- sentation of the organisation it serves. In this way, thesauri constitute a network of mediation having historical, social and - because of the scien- tific community served - scientific and technological perspectives. These three perspectives are embedded in time, since changes in organisation change the person-to-person relations, change in retrieval and indexing needs change the person-to-term relations and changes in document type and science change term-to-term relations. In particular, we want to analyse the network originally proposed by the EURATOM thesaurus (1st ed.; European Atomic Energy Community. Information and Documentation Center, Brussels, 1964) and the network of relations - in the three perspectives above - it assumed. Subsequently, we compare the results of this analysis with a more recent thesaurus designed for a community very close to the one originating the EURATOM thesaurus. In doing this, we designed a system that aims the user to browse a path built through the relations. Its in- terface is based on different concepts: Focus+Context and Elastic Grid, which led to the creation of a flexible graphical structure characterised by hierarchically-arranged and scalable information visualisation.

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Related concepts (24)
Thesaurus
A thesaurus (: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where you can find different words with same meanings to other words), sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed Synonym dictionaries have a long history.
Document retrieval
Document retrieval is defined as the matching of some stated user query against a set of free-text records. These records could be any type of mainly unstructured text, such as newspaper articles, real estate records or paragraphs in a manual. User queries can range from multi-sentence full descriptions of an information need to a few words. Document retrieval is sometimes referred to as, or as a branch of, text retrieval. Text retrieval is a branch of information retrieval where the information is stored primarily in the form of text.
Information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.
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