- From: Mark van Assem <mark@cs.vu.nl>
- Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:59:14 +0100
- To: Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk>
- CC: public-esw-thes@w3.org
Hi Leonard,
> 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.
I think the benefits of going for a Semantic Web representation of a
thesaurus are that it makes all kinds of sharing and integration
scenarios easier (I'm explicitly only saying easier, because the same
things can probably be done with other technologies).
The Dope project [1] may be a nice example. Different document
collections are indexed using an RDF version of Emtree, a large life
science thesaurus. Then they can be searched and browsed with a special
browser interface.
Probably the DOPE browser is Emtree specific, but if it's made to fit
SKOS this could be a standard tool to use when someone wants to connect
different collections using a thesaurus of choice.
A nice thing of the architecture is that the original sources can stay
in their original format. A mapping is made to RDF once and can be
repeated when the source collection is updated.
Mark.
----
[1] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/postscript/IEEE-IS04.pdf
--
Mark F.J. van Assem - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
mark@cs.vu.nl - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark
Received on Friday, 25 February 2005 16:59:18 UTC