Establishing and Handling Multilingual
Thesauri
The Institute for Computer and
Information Engineering has developed a technology allowing
one for fast and effortless establishment and maintenance of
multilingual thesauri.
MTM is the software for multilingual thesauri building and
maintenance. It has been designed as a configurable system
assisting a user in creating concepts, linking them by means of a
set of predefined relations, and controlling the validity of the
thesaurus structure. The system has been developed on top of
Micro CDS/ISIS, as a collection of programs written in
ISIS/PASCAL.
The main features of the software are inter alia:
- thesaurus maintenance and support system;
- KWOC and full tree representation and navigation tools
available on-line;
- KWIC, KWOC and full tree printouts (in an alphabetic and
systematic order);
- defining and customization of up to 100 conceptual
relationship types;
- management of facets, codes (top classification),
sources, regional variants, historical notes, etc.;
- support of the various types of authority files;
- computer assisted merging;
- thesauri comparison by means of windows;
- support of the various alphabets;
- support of linguistic and orthographic variants;
- sorting facilities consistent with national standards;
- variable length data handling;
- flexibility in defining input and output forms;
- versatility in terms of relative ease of configuring the
software for the various sets of languages;
- flexibility in defining data structures needed for a
given application;
- a possibility to exchange data with other organizations
and systems through exporting and importing terms and
relations.
From the terminal user standpoint MTM fulfills the following
criteria:
- user-friendliness when entering, updating, deleting,
checking data;
- intelligent prompting of the end user whenever in doubt;
- powerful validation facilities covering proper
structuring of a thesaurus (e.g. maintenance of
relationship isomorphism between languages);
- features for documenting ("keeping track") the
history of the thesaurus evolution;
- availability of data protection facilities;
- availability of self-training and demonstration
facilities;
- provision of a thesaurus publishing facilities at the
professional level;
- modularity and openness to the further development.
Main applications at:
- CEDEFOP's thesaurus, Berlin, Germany
- CIDAR, Vienna, Austria
- FAO's Agrovoc, Rome, Italy
- Infoterra Thesaurus, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya
- Library of Parliament of Russia, Moscow, Russia
- OECD, Paris, France
- OeFSE, Vienna, Austria
- Polish Parliament Library, Warsaw, Poland
For more information please contact
us.