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The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology for assessing thesauri and other controlled vocabularies management tools that can represent content using the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) data model, and their use in a Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm. It effectively analyses selected set of tools in order to prove the validity of the method.

A set of 27 criteria grouped in five evaluation indicators is proposed and applied to ten vocabulary management applications which are compliant with the SKOS data model. Previous studies of controlled vocabulary management software are gathered and analyzed, to compare the evaluation parameters used and the results obtained for each tool.

The results indicate that the tool that obtains the highest score in every indicator is Poolparty. The second and third tools are, respectively, TemaTres and Intelligent Theme Manager, but scoring lower in most of the evaluation items. The use of a broad set of criteria to evaluate vocabularies management tools gives satisfactory results. The set of five indicators and 27 criteria proposed here represents a useful evaluation system in the selection of current and future tools to manage vocabularies.

The paper only assesses the ten most important/well know software tools applied for thesaurus and vocabulary management until October 2016. However, the evaluation criteria could be applied to new software that could appear in the future to create/manage SKOS vocabularies in compliance with LOD standards.

The originality of this paper relies on the proposed indicators and criteria to evaluate vocabulary management tools. Those criteria and indicators can be valuable also for future software that might appear. The indicators are also applied to the most exhaustive and qualified list of this kind of tools. The paper will help designers, information architects, metadata librarians, and other staff involved in the design of digital information systems, to choose the right tool to manage their vocabularies in a LOD/vocabulary scenario.

This article provides an overview of recent developments relating to the application of thesauri in information organisation and retrieval on the World Wide Web. It describes some recent thesaurus projects undertaken to facilitate resource description and discovery and access to wide‐ranging information resources on the Internet. Types of thesauri available on the Web, thesauri integrated in databases and information retrieval systems, and multiple‐thesaurus systems for cross‐database searching are also discussed. Collective efforts and events in addressing the standardisation and novel applications of thesauri are briefly reviewed.

The paper aims to investigate issues surrounding publishing thesauri as linked data and explores a systematic way for publishing linked open thesauri

Based on the four principles of linked data, a novel approach is proposed to incorporate terminology services with thesauri and provide more descriptive information about thesauri and relating services. A proof-of-concept system was built for demonstrating the approach.

Carefully designed URIs and terminology services are necessary for publishing linked open thesauri. However, there is still a lack of standards for describing linked open thesauri and terminology services. Since it is possible to publish thesauri at the hands of creators and maintainers, distributed thesauri may be a good complement to the traditional registry approach.

Only a simple knowledge organisation system (SKOS) core model is considered in the paper. There may be some adjustment for applying the findings to thesauri using the SKOS extended model and other models.

The paper proposes a more systematic way for publishing linked open thesauri. It is important to consider a linked open thesaurus as a dynamic system rather than a static data dump. In addition, functionality for using thesauri is equally important for publishing thesauri.

The purpose of this study is to carry out a systematic literature review for evidence-based assessment of the effectiveness of thesaurus in digital information retrieval systems. It also aimed to identify the evaluation methods, evaluation measures and data collection tools which may be used in evaluating digital information retrieval systems.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of 344 publications from LISA and 238 from Scopus has been carried out to identify the evaluation studies for analysis, and 15 evaluation studies have been analyzed.

This study presents evidences for the effectiveness of thesaurus in digital information retrieval systems. Various methods for evaluating digital information systems have been identified. Also, a wide range of evaluation measures and data collection tools have been identified.

The study was limited to the literature published in English language and indexed in LISA and Scopus. The evaluation methods, evaluation measures and data collection tools identified in this study may be used to design more cognizant evaluation studies for digital information retrieval systems.

The findings have significant implications for the administrators of any type of digital information retrieval systems in making more informed decisions toward implementation of thesaurus in resource description and access to digital collections.

This study extends our knowledge on the potentials of thesauri in digital information retrieval systems. It also provides cues for designing more cognizant evaluation studies for digital information systems.

A description is given of the English Electric ‘Thesaurofacet’, a faceted classification and thesaurus covering engineering and related scientific, technical, and management subjects. A novel feature of the system is the integration of the classification schedules and thesaurus. Each term appears both in the thesaurus and in the schedules. In the schedules the term is displayed in the most appropriate facet and hierarchy: the thesaurus supplements this information by indicating alternative hierarchies and other relationships which cut across the classified arrangement. The thesaurus also controls word forms and synonyms and acts as the alphabetical index to the class numbers. The resulting tool is multipurpose, as easily applicable to shelf arrangement and conventional classified card catalogues as to co‐ordinate indexing and computerized retrieval systems. The reasons are given for modifying certain traditional facet techniques, including the choice of traditional disciplines for main classes, the lack of a ‘built‐in’ preferred order, and the me, in certain instances, of enumeration rather than synthesis to express multi‐term concepts. Methods of application of the Thesaurofacet in pre‐coordinate and post‐coordinate systems are discussed and a brief account is given of the techniques employed in its compilation.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.

To propose a comprehensive and semi‐automatic method for constructing or updating knowledge organization tools such as thesauri.

The paper proposes a comprehensive methodology for thesaurus construction and maintenance combining shallow NLP with a clustering algorithm and an information visualization interface. The resulting system TermWatch, extracts terms from a text collection, mines semantic relations between them using complementary linguistic approaches and clusters terms using these semantic relations. The clusters are mapped onto a 2D using an integrated visualization tool.

The clusters formed exhibit the different relations necessary to populate a thesaurus or ontology: synonymy, generic/specific and relatedness. The clusters represent, for a given term, its closest neighbours in terms of semantic relations.

This could change the way in which information professionals (librarians and documentalists) undertake knowledge organization tasks. TermWatch can be useful either as a starting point for grasping the conceptual organization of knowledge in a huge text collection without having to read the texts, then actually serving as a suggestive tool for populating different hierarchies of a thesaurus or an ontology because its clusters are based on semantic relations.

This lies in several points: combined use of linguistic relations with an adapted clustering algorithm, which is scalable and can handle sparse data. The paper proposes a comprehensive approach to semantic relations acquisition whereas existing studies often use one or two approaches. The domain knowledge maps produced by the system represents an added advantage over existing approaches to automatic thesaurus construction in that clusters are formed using semantic relations between domain terms. Thus while offering a meaningful synthesis of the information contained in the original corpus through clustering, the results can be used for knowledge organization tasks (thesaurus building and ontology population) The system also constitutes a platform for performing several knowledge‐oriented tasks like science and technology watch, textmining, query refinement.

A brief discussion of discipline formation in information management is used to introduce the way different terminology is employed for describing information professionals as well as what it is that they do. This leads to a comparison of how information professionals and their professions are described in several of the thesauri that are the tools of the trade. These thesauri show marked differences in treatment of similar concepts.

The need for thesauri to help users in their search for information in online information systems has been discussed for several decades. Many wide‐ranging contributions have been made to solve this problem. Nevertheless, investigation is needed to design a thesaurus structure based on what is relevant for users and generators of information within a specific subject domain. This paper explores the possibility of creating a thesaurus from the cognitive viewpoint. This approach is based on a system (in this case represented by a thesaurus) that organises its representation of knowledge or its classification as closely as possible to the authors‘ and users’ images of the subject domain with the objective of increasing the interaction between users and texts, and thus the communication in a given information retrieval system. From this point of view, the thesaurus structure is considered as the essential foundation on which to base such an interactive thesaurus. Furthermore, this structure is conceived as representing the merging point for both the generators‘ and the users’ models of the subject domain and for their information needs. This paper is dedicated mainly to the generators‘ side involved in this process. It demonstrates how an author’s writings can be used to identify the generators‘ model and perception of the subject domain, and how these can later be inserted in the thesaurus structure. Discourse analysis is used as a main method to identify the categories and its relevance for building such a structure is discussed. It also outlines a general approach for the user side to set up different methods of getting the users’ information needs into the thesaurus structure.