This website is for information architects and web masters, it looks at 3 thesaurus management tools to evaluate their effectiveness in improving retrieval and navigation.
A thesaurus holds terms that have been created in a vocabulary, allowing faceted relationships to be created between terms and often including notes to help disambiguate between similar entries. The terms that are managed by a thesaurus are carefully chosen and are known as a controlled vocabulary. The “goal of a controlled vocabulary is to facilitate agreement between the concepts within the site and the vocabulary of the person using it”(Gazan, 2006).
Thesaurus management software allows users to input terms, create relationships (variant term, narrower term, broader term, use for, related term and top/preferred term) between them and should provide means to apply these terms and relationships to the online setting, to facilitate searching. In the context of Information Architecture, “the purpose of thesauri in information retrieval is to provide a uniform and consistent vocabulary for indexing documents in information systems and to supply users with a certain vocabulary for the retrieval of documents in such systems”(Kramer, Nikolai, & Habeck, 1997, p. 122). A website that has a thesaurus in its back end can allow for a more seamless and satisfying experience for the user on the front end (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006, p. 193).
Enabling navigation and searching are the two broad goals of implementing a controlled vocabulary to a website, intranet or document collection. Research into user frustration when using web site recommended improvements including “terminology changes, organization into thematic categories, and provision of metadata to support searches” (Ceaparu & Shneiderman, 2003, p. 22). Thus, “thesauri usually per¬form the function of harmonizing terminologies, controlling vocabularies and/or support the user in browsing through a concept space” (Nagy, Pellegrini, Schandl, Blumauer, & Mader, 2011).
This website looks at three thesaurus management systems. MulteTes and Cognatrix are both smaller-scale and single user and restricted to one operating system. PoolParty represents the larger scale, enterprise approach and is multi-operating system compliant.
References
Ceaparu, J. L. K. B. I., & Shneiderman, J. R. B. (2003). Help! I'm lost: User frustration in web navigation. It & Society, 1(3), 18-26.
Gazan, R. (2006). Controlled vocabulary and thesaurus design: Trainee's manual. Cataloging for the 21st Century. Library of Congress. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/catworkshop/courses/thesaurus/index.htmlKramer, R., Nikolai, R., & Habeck, C. (1997). Thesaurus federations: loosely integrated thesauri for document retrieval in networks based on Internet technologies. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 1(2), 122-131.
Morville, P., & Rosenfeld, L. (2006). Information architecture for the World Wide Web. (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly Media.
Nagy, H., Pellegrini, T., Schandl, T., Blumauer, A., & Mader, C. (2011). Realizing thesaurus based uses cases with the PoolParty Suite. bid: textos universitaris de biblioteconomia i documentacio, 27(Dec.). Retrieved from http://www.ub.edu/bid/27/nagy3.htm