With necessity being the mother of invention, this particular blogger/developer created a tool to serve the purpose of a thesaurus construction application. You may know it as www.thesauri.co.uk. Further developments more recently attempted to bring it into line with the International Standard (BS ISO 25964-1). There are challenges and the journey isn’t complete but there are lessons to learn from his initiative. This information came to us from Steve Burgess’ blog post, “Polyhierarchical Thesauri – Node Labels.”
The approach is different from a traditional thesaurus in that he mixes techniques for Subject Headings with techniques for Thesauri. We aren’t saying it is wrong, just different, and a perfect example of the variety of approaches that can be taken.
There does seem to be some argument about the interpretation of the standard itself, and that is okay. Discussions create clarity. There is a need for the application of standards. Clear, consistent data is important for indexing and retrieving data in any field of business. As we move into more business intelligence integration, remember that standards are what drives consistency and optimization. It is the cornerstone for making content findable. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
