Semantic and Thematic Navigation in Electronic Encyclopedias

In the field of electronic publishing, encyclopedias represent a unique sort of text for investigating advanced methods of navigation. The user of an electronic encyclopedia normally expects special methods for accessing the entries in an encyclopedia database. Navigation through printed encyclopedias in the traditional sense focuses on the alphabetic order of the entries. In electronic encyclopedias, however, thematic structuring of lemmas and, of course, extensive (hyper-)linking mechanisms have been added. This paper will focus on showing developments, which go beyond these navigational structures. We will concentrate on the semantic space formed by lemmas to build a network of semantic distances and thematic trails through the encyclopedia.