RE: Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

Mark and Alistair,

At 17:24 3/05/2005, Miles, AJ \(Alistair\) wrote:

>Most thesauri are stored in a relational database, XML file(s) or text 
>file(s).
>It is usually possible to create an RDF representation of a thesaurus from 
>its current representation format via some sort of automated procedure 
>(e.g. a text parsing program, an XSLT transformation etc.)

I have no objection to the rest of the text which sounds very sensible, and 
gives a good example. However I wonder if it is really true that there are 
very many thesauri stored in XML files or (really!?!) text files. From the 
user point of view the largest category would probably be thesauri that are 
stored in thesaurus management systems; whether the RDBMS that underlies 
most of those would be visible or accessible to most users is another 
question. How about the following text instead?

<quote>
Most thesauri are managed in a automated system, often in a relational 
database structure but possibly in other formats. It should usually be 
possible to create an RDF representation of the thesaurus, either directly 
from the source data or indirectly from standard output of the thesaurus 
management system, via some sort of automated procedure (e.g. a database 
report, a text parsing program or an XSLT transformation).
</quote>

I think this might this be a little closer to reality. (Or at least reality 
as I perceive it. ;-)

Ron

Ron Davies
Information and documentation systems consultant
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