Role of Thesauri in a Scientific Organization

We aim at describing the mediation language between users and indexers in a document retrieval system for a big scientific community intimately related to the EU policies. We argue that this mediation can be represented at three levels by thesauri. At the first level, thesauri are sets of indexes apparently coordinating the possible searches by means of term to term relations like NT (narrower term) and RT (related term). At an higher level, persons to terms relations are consequent to the use of thesauri for indexing and retrieval, while person to person relations are embodied into a thesaurus via the implicit representation of the organisation it serves. In this way, thesauri constitute a network of mediation having historical, social and - because of the scientific community served - scientific and technological perspectives. These three perspectives are embedded in time, since changes in organisation change the person to person relations, change in retrieval and indexing needs change the person to term relations and changes in document types, aims of the organization and progress in science change term to term relations. In particular, we want to analyse the network originally proposed by the EURATOM thesaurus [EUR] and the network of relations ¿ in the three perspectives above - it assumed. Subsequently, we compare the results of this analysis with a more recent thesaurus designed for a community very close to the one originating the EURATOM thesaurus. Following this analysis, we designed an information retrieval system for the mentioned scientific community. This system provides to its users a browsing mechanism through the relations above. Its interface is based on the Focus+Context and Elastic Grid concepts, allowing for a flexible graphical structure. [EUR] EURATOM-thesaurus, 1st ed.; European Atomic Energy Community. Information and Documentation Center, Brussels 1964;

FERIGATO Carlo;  MERLO Giuseppe;  PANFILI Daniela;  RODIGHIERO Dario; 

2009-07-23

Universal-Publishers

JRC48348

http://ec.europa.eu/eclas/F/?func=direct&local_base=eclas&doc_number=000478399,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC48348,