Dominique,

Any good thesaurus management system (or rather any content/SMR
management system that employs thesauri) will use the structure of the
thesaurus to enhance data retrieval and input.

<standards_stuff>
Don't compromise your thesaurus around what technology can and can't do
-- just build it to standard.  Thesauri structures actually subscribe to
an international ISO standard (ISO 2788), though a new standard called
BS 8723, "Structured vocabularies for information retrieval - Guide" is
currently underway.  There's also one for multi-lingual thesauri (ISO
5964).  The mandate a  many-to-one relationship between terms and their
related narrow terms (NT), broad terms (BT), related terms (RT) and
non-preferred terms (U).   As an added note: so-called polyhierarchal
thesauri are great, because the same term can live in multiple
structures within the thesaurus.
</standards_stuff>

EH and the MDA are careful to construct their thesauri to standards and
you should really think of getting in touch with the team at EH DSU
about this if you have not done so already.

In short, if you are building a new thesaurus for environmental terms,
just be sure to build it to standards, and any good SMR system will be
able in turn to support it.


Tyler

--
Dr Tyler Bell
Technical Director
Oxford ArchDigital Ltd.