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

In message <421F4682.6010704@cs.vu.nl> on Fri, 25 Feb 2005, Mark van 
Assem <mark@cs.vu.nl> wrote
> people that are interested in the (Quick) Guide, are interested 
>because they (a) want to know if there are benefits of an RDF version 
>of a thesaurus and (b) aren't experts so would like pointers on how to 
>do conversion. So maybe I have a wrong idea of the intended audience, 
>what is your view on this?

I am probably a member of this audience - I know about thesauri, but 
don't yet know of the benefits of converting them into a more complex 
format that we use at present.

To be convinced that it was worthwhile learning how to do conversion, I 
would need to see the end-user tools and interfaces that will allow 
people to use thesauri more effectively and to link them to the 
databases or web resources that are ultimately being sought.

The development of these tools and interfaces may well influence the way 
in which the thesaurus data is structured - I am a strong believer in 
systems being driven by the required output, and much of the discussion 
here up to now has been rather theoretical and abstract, though I know 
that there has been some discussion of "use cases". Have I missed work 
that has been done towards providing helpful front ends that will lead 
naive searchers and help them to gain the advantage of underlying 
semantic structures?

Leonard Will

-- 
Willpower Information       (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
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Received on Friday, 25 February 2005 16:00:35 UTC