While information retrieval thesauri may improve search results, there is little research documenting whether general information system users employ these vocabulary tools. This article explores user comprehension and searching with thesauri. Data were gathered as part of a larger empirical query-expansion study involving the ProQuest‚ Controlled Vocabulary. The results suggest that users’ kno...

Thesauri are hierarchical knowledge organization systems commonly used in libraries to categorize and index publications. While sometimes referred to as so-called lightweight ontologies [4], they actually fundamentally differ from ontologies in several aspects. Nevertheless, as thesauri are actively used, constantly maintained and improved, they offer an interesting background knowledge for sem...

Structures and linguistic concepts of thesauri are analyzed and compared. Proposals for the improvement of thesauri are developed.

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 da...

Although commonly used in both commercial and experimental information retrieval systems, thesauri have not demonstrated consistent beneets for retrieval performance, and it is diicult to construct a thesaurus automatically for large text databases. In this paper, an approach, called PhraseFinder, is proposed to construct collection-dependent association thesauri automatically using large full-...

Recently a great number of controlled vocabularies (e.g., thesauri) covering several domains and shared by di↵erent communities, have been published and interlinked using the Linked Data paradigm. Remarkable e↵orts have been spent from data producers to make their thesauri compliant with Linked Data requirements both for the content encoding and for the connections (aka, linkset) with others th...

One of the main holdbacks towards a wide use of ontologies is the high building cost. In order to reduce this effort, reuse of existing Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs), and in particular thesauri, is a valuable and much cheaper alternative to build ontologies from scratch. In the literature tools to support such reuse and conversion of thesauri as well as re-engineering patterns already e...

A new breed of engineering design tools are electronic design notebooks, which are electronic versions of the traditional engineer’s logbook. They capture design information as it is generated, providing a rich, unfiltered history of a design project. This presents great potential for accessing past design decisions and rationale. This paper examines ways of searching for design information by ...