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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.

This study aims to analyse the appropriateness of the information content and organization of multinational companies' (MNCs) web sites for Turkish local cultural values with the aim of supporting global brand management decisions.

In order to gather data for the study, 108 MNCs' web sites are analysed by content analysis which is an objective, systematic and quantitative way of conducting information about communication content.

It is seen from the analyses that foreign multinationals could adapt their web sites' information content to local markets appropriately and sufficiently. However, the face (language) and the way (menu) that these data are presented were not adapted as compared to information content on their web sites.

This study has mainly considered the company side of web sites and neglects the consumer side. Future researchers interested in this area could also investigate how consumers perceive adaptation activities of foreign multinationals through web sites in their countries.

One of the major decisions MNCs face in using web sites regards how to organize and present the web site content to fit local needs and values. Although adaptation becomes a major concern, there is no standard for the multicultural content of web sites. There are several cross‐cultural studies in the literature which compare countries by correlating the analysed variables with Hofstede's scores. Rather than comparing home and host countries of foreign multinationals based on certain dimensions, it is found to be more appropriate to assess on what terms and to what degree these companies could adapt or standardize their global communication channels, namely their web sites, in Turkey.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and implement a faceted classification structure to improve web information organization, access and navigability.

Some case studies of commercial web sites using faceted metadata were analyzed to develop the classification approach. The proposed framework adapts the facet analysis theory from Faceted Classification System (FCS) to use semantic web tools especially XML and RDF store, and ontology, and is designed to be integrated within a Content Management System (CMS). A detailed example of a faceted classification system for an academic information system is used to demonstrate the construction of an FCS from metadata.

Detailed examples show how classifying and organizing information in multidimensional hierarchies is more accessible than simple one‐dimensional taxonomic hierarchies.

A prototype, based on the proposed framework, is being developed using the web site of an academic institution as a case study.

Enhances the FCS research with a notion of integrating ontology driven faceted classification structures by XML/RDF language and content management tools. A dynamic approach to organizing and searching web information provides users with multiple ways of accessing information based on their knowledge and information needs.

Collection development activities are an important and ongoing component of every library. The historically paper‐driven environment of this work is changing. With intranets and Web authoring tools, digitizing your collection development workflow enables libraries to have an increased level of efficiency and accessibility. This article outlines the creation, development, and implementation of Web accessible collection development tools. These tools integrate procedures, forms, policies, and library organization Web sites. Information about project revisions, modifications, and suggestions for future projects is included. A coordinated collection development Web site may consist of online tools, Web resources, work‐flow processes, instructions and other information for selectors and library staff, as well as information for library patrons.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which Web 2.0 applications are prevalent in government web sites, the ways in which Web 2.0 applications have been used in government web sites, as well as whether the presence of Web 2.0 applications correlates with the perceived quality of government web sites.

Divided equally between developing and advanced economies, a total of 200 government web sites were analysed using content analysis and multiple regression analysis.

The prevalence of seven Web 2.0 applications in descending order was: RSS, multimedia sharing services, blogs, forums, social tagging services, social networking services and wikis. More web sites in advanced countries include Web 2.0 applications than those in developing countries. The presence of Web 2.0 applications was found to have a correlation with the overall web site quality, and in particular, service quality.

This paper only covers government web sites in English. Emerging genres of Web 2.0 applications such as mashups and virtual worlds have not been included. Moreover the data were drawn solely from the public domain.

Decision makers and e‐government web developers may benchmark their own efforts in deploying Web 2.0 applications against this study. The numerous exemplars cited here serve as a springboard to generate more ideas on how Web 2.0 applications could be used and harnessed to improve the overall quality of government web sites.

This paper unites two research interests: Web 2.0 and web site quality. It also extends previous studies by investigating the suite of Web 2.0 applications found in government web sites around the world.

A web site usually contains a large number of concept entities, each consisting of one or more web pages connected by hyperlinks. In order to discover these concept entities for more expressive web site queries and other applications, the web unit mining problem has been proposed. Web unit mining aims to determine web pages that constitute a concept entity and classify concept entities into categories. Nevertheless, the performance of an existing web unit mining algorithm, iWUM, suffers as it may create more than one web unit (incomplete web units) from a single concept entity. This paper presents two methods to solve this problem. The first method introduces a more effective web fragment construction method so as reduce later classification errors. The second method incorporates site‐specific knowledge to discover and handle incomplete web units. Experiments show that incomplete web units can be removed and overall accuracy has been significantly improved, especially on the precision and F1 measures.

Clustering web search results into dynamic clusters and hierarchies provides a promising way to alleviate the overabundance of information typically found in ranked list search engines. This study seeks to investigate the usefulness of clustering textual results in web search by analysing the search performance and users' satisfaction levels with and without the aid of clusters and hierarchies.

This study utilises two evaluation metrics. One is a usability test of clustering interfaces measured by users' search performances; the other is a comprehension test measured by users' satisfaction levels. Various methods were used to support the two tests, including experiments, observations, questionnaires, interviews, and search log analysis.

The results showed that there was no significant difference between the ranked list and clustering interfaces, although participants searched slightly faster, retrieved a larger number of relevant pages, and were more satisfied when using the ranked list interface without clustering. Even so, the clustering interface offers opportunities for diversified searching. Moreover, the repetitive ratio of relevant results found by each participant was low. Other advantages of the clustering interface are that it highlights important concepts and offers richer contexts for exploring, learning and discovering related concepts; however, it may induce a certain amount of anxiety about missing or losing important information.

The evaluation of a clustering interface is rather difficult, particularly in the context of the web search environment, which is used by a large heterogeneous user population for a wide variety of tasks. The study employed multiple data collection methods and in particular designed a combination of usability and comprehension tests to offer preliminary results on users' evaluation of real‐world clustering search interfaces. The results may extend the understanding of search characteristics with a cluster‐based web search engine, and could be used as a vehicle for further discussion of user evaluation research into this area.

The purpose of this paper is to address a library service based on semantic web technologies capable of exposing knowledge that is otherwise hidden in a library's subject headings repository.

The proposed service implements a web‐based information seeking process that combines browsing and searching of information assets within a library, based on their corresponding subject headings. The underlying subject headings hierarchy is the Greek translation of a subset of the official Library of Congress subject headings. The information seeking process exposes the expressiveness of an underlying ontology capable of modeling subject headings together with their relations.

In order to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real‐world scenario, the library service is integrated into a working OPAC located at the Ionian University in Greece. Thus, the library service contributes to the fast retrieval of information. Moreover, during the information seeking process, users underpin their cognitive learning.

The paper introduces a novel service for the library domain capable of being integrated in many library portals. Serving as a semantic web application, the proposed work promotes interactive navigation in ontology structures that could be potentially exploited by ontologies developed in other domains.

This paper aims to describe continuing effort to develop a repository of teaching materials for sharing and reuse in library and information science (LIS) schools in Asia. It also aims to propose a framework for carrying out a user study to validate the taxonomy and metadata, and evaluate how they support the reuse of teaching materials in four Asian countries.

This study uses a combination of approaches. The first phase focuses on building a repository of learning materials powered by taxonomy and metadata with enhanced searching and browsing capabilities. The second phase uses different evaluation techniques to propose a framework for assessing the usability of learning materials.

The potential for reuse of teaching materials in the area of information organization is examined by analyzing how various aspects of this topic are covered in three Master's programs in Information Studies, Knowledge Management, and Information Systems at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A faceted taxonomy has been helpful in tagging different types of learning objects. A metadata scheme based on DC‐Education and LOM has been used for enhanced description of learning materials.

This paper makes contributions in several ways. It suggests guidelines for developing taxonomies in different domains; describes steps in building repositories of learning materials; and suggests a methodology for studying reusability of learning material.