PoolParty promotes its software as a multilingual, open standard, WC3 compliant thesaurus management software. Unlike MultiTes and Cognatrix, this is a large-scale enterprise thesaurus system designed for multiple users and is neither platform-restricted nor reliant on local storage of its files, as cloud storage is also offered as an additional feature. Another dissimilarity is that it is web-based and can be utilised collaboratively from inside a web browser. The tool is aimed towards users who do not have special IT or taxonomy skills and experience. For comprehensive support, there is a special PoolParty Thesaurus Management Wiki (hyperlink). The tool uses SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), the open standards for thesauri creation created by W3C. This is a way to represent knowledge that uses the Resource description framework, making it interoperable across various computer operating systems (W3C Semantic Web, 2012).
As with the other two tools reviewed so far, the thesaurus is part of an integrated suite. PoolParty Extractor is a text-mining application and Pool Party Semantic Search is an enterprise full-text search engine, “for Semantic Web applications especially the information re¬trieval and document processing aspects on top of controlled vocabularies are of great importance” (Nagy, Pellegrini, Schandl, Blumauer, & Mader, 2011) Unlike MultiTes and Cognatrix, this tool was designed and built specifically for use in commercial web applications. Thus the whole suite is specifically suited to the end purpose of online navigation and retrieval.
This software is designed for commercial enterprise application, thus the costs are far greater than smaller tools. For licensing on a single server, the cost is € 16,000. For the cloud-based service, there is an initial € 1800 fee and a cost of € 8000 per year. Like MultiTes, an educational license is available. As mentioned in the other product reviews, information architect would need to carefully evaluate the scale, goals and budget of the website development project before committing to such a large-scale system. In some instances, free, open source thesaurus software could meet the company’s needs.
References
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
W3C Semantic Web. (2012). Introduction to SKOS. Retrieved 10 Sep 2012, from http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/intro