Hello all,
Just to add my support to one point from Leonards comprehensive posting...
Leonard wrote "...I think that the main reason that it is not more widely
available is due to the limitations of the software being used for
thesaurus development and for searching. This is unfortunate, because
there is software available for both functions that can cope with it
perfectly well."
This is our experience too. A couple of years back the NMR looked at a
number of propietary archive software systems. Several suggested that they
could store, manipulate and search using thesauri, which was important to
us, but none (at that time) supported polyhierarchical thesauri, which we
saw as essential.
Looking at the foreword to the 4th edition of Aitchison, Gilchrist and
Bawden 'Thesaurus Construction, a practical handbook' the authors suggest
that the British Standard covering this area (BS 5723:1987) is overdue for
overhaul. Possibly this may account for the wide variety of ways in which
thesauri are implemented in software?
Is this something that the cultural heritage community, with its wide range
of experience in dealing with particularly complex data should be involved
in (or perhaps be taking a lead on)?
Edmund Lee
English Heritage
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