I'm a self-confessed internet junkie, and I'm rarely surprised by anything that I find nowadays. But when I stumbled across the Visual Thesaurus I have to admit that I was intrigued. I love to write for fun, but invariably end up using the same old words. I'm not a huge fan of the traditional Roget's Thesaurus -- I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to master it, but it was more than a couple of years -- (...) so I thought it would be fun to see connected words laid out in a more visual manner. (shrink)

This case study aims to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage information about the North American community folk dance tradition of contra dance through development of a thesaurus of choreographic terms and a domain ontology. A survey of dance resources was conducted, reviewing historic and modern examples of contra dance choreography notation and instructions, records of dance events, and recordings of dance performances. Domain and content analysis were performed on the resources to collect and organize concepts and themes regarding choreographic (...) components and their relationships, the structure and function of cultural works, their creative expressions, and the evidence of those expressions in documents and recordings. Vocabulary used in the description of contra dance choreography was identified, classified, and notated to build a thesaurus, which was used as the basis of a domain ontology. Ontology building methodology and existing conceptual models for cultural heritage domains guided the ontology development and revision phases. The study also seeks to safeguard an intangible cultural heritage by applying knowledge organization and semantic approaches to folk dance in order to model such challenges as multiple, simultaneous modes of communication and forms of representation, modular conceptual components, descriptive sequences, differing levels of structured information, and complex cultural networks found at various levels of domain discourse. (shrink)

Irish traditional music is a complex system of interconnections and relationships. For example, the same tune title can refer to many different tunes, and the same tune can have many different titles. Developing a system whereby a tune can be presented with all its variants and relations, along with its source recordings, has been the work of many scholars in the field. It is only with the advent of Linked Data technologies that a solution to this issue can be truly (...) envisaged. One element of this solution is the creation of authority files presented as SKOS thesauri, such as the ITMA Subject Thesaurus. Best-practice in thesauri creation was followed to create the IST. Existing literature on the subject was surveyed for terms and phrases that could be included. The terms were organised within 21 facets, each facet being a discrete unit describing some element of the tradition. This research builds on ITMA’s existing Linked Data offerings. It provides a road-map for the creation of other thesauri and is a foundation stone for ITMA on which future developments in Linked Data can be built. (shrink)

We performed a qualitative analysis of the Thesaurus in order to assess its conformity with principles of good practice in terminology and ontology design. We used both the on-line browsable version of the Thesaurus and its OWL-representation (version 04.08b, released on August 2, 2004), measuring each in light of the requirements put forward in relevant ISO terminology standards and in light of ontological principles advanced in the recent literature. Version 04.08b of the NCI Thesaurus suffers from the (...) same broad range of problems that have been observed in other biomedical terminologies. For its further development, we recommend the use of a more principled approach that allows the Thesaurus to be tested not just for internal consistency but also for its degree of correspondence to that part of reality which it is designed to represent. (shrink)

The National Cancer Institute’s Thesaurus (NCIT) has been created with the goal of providing a controlled vocabulary which can be used by specialists in the various sub-domains of oncology. It is intended to be used for purposes of annotation in ways designed to ensure the integration of data and information deriving from these various sub-domains, and thus to support more powerful cross-domain inferences. In order to evaluate its suitability for this purpose, we examined the NCIT’s treatment of the kinds (...) of entities which are fundamental to an ontology of colon carcinoma. We here describe the problems we uncovered concerning classification, synonymy, relations and definitions, and we draw conclusions for the work needed to establish the NCIT as a reference ontology for the cancer domain in the future. (shrink)

The construction of complex ontologies can be facilitated by adapting existing vocabularies. There is little clarity and in fact little consensus as to what modifications of vocabularies are necessary in order to re-engineer them into ontologies. In this paper we present a method that provides clear steps to follow when re-engineering a thesaurus. The method makes use of top-level ontologies and was derived from the structural differences between thesauri and ontologies as well as from best practices in modeling, some (...) of which have been advocated in the biomedical domain. We illustrate each step of our method with examples from a re-engineering case study about agricultural fertilizers based on the AGROVOC thesaurus. Our method makes clear that re-engineering thesauri requires far more than just a syntactic conversion into a formal language or other easily automatable steps. The method can not only be used for re-engineering thesauri, but does also summarize steps for building ontologies in general, and can hence be adapted for the re-engineering of other types of vocabularies or terminologies. (shrink)

Excerpt from Elementum: Eine Vorarbeit zum Griechischen und Lateinischen Thesaurus Aber das Wasser, das ich rasch zu durchwaten dachte, reichte mir bald an den Hals. Das Bachlein schwoll zum Strome der Strom zum Meere an und die Kuste entschwand dem weiter Schwimmenden aus den Blicken. So hatte ich mich wohl noch lange nicht wieder zuruck an das rettende Ufer gefunden, wenn nicht der Wunsch Ihnen, themer Freund zur richtigen Zeit meine Gabe darzubringen dem Ermatteten neuen Mut gegeben und zur (...) Auf bietung aller Krafte angestachelt hatte. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Saint Basil the Great wrote one of the most important and widely acknowledged Eucharistic texts in the Eastern Orthodox Church, a liturgical anaphora that bears his name. Before the dawn of the second millennium, this was the main Eucharistic text used in Constantinople and in the territories under its authority. In the modern time of digital media, the liturgical research methods have been improved by using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database. The emergence of patristic and liturgical texts in this (...) novel format was able to revolutionise the field of Comparative Liturgics, allowing to very quickly find the possible internal clues, which prove the basilian authorship of the anaphora bearing St. Basil's name. By the quick and accurate computer scanning of a part of the post-Sanctus prayer, a relatively complete picture of the relatedness of vocabulary, the author's theological and ascetical nomenclature, the recurring thought patterns, parallel passages and hapax legomena, rare terms and their frequency, is obtained. CONTRIBUTION: The present article aims to demonstrate that Theology has to be connected to modern research methods because the findings of such an academic approach are helpful for the development of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, that is so well promoted by HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies. (shrink)

A multilingual thesaurus’ development needs the appropriate methodological considerations not only for linguistics, but also cultural heterogeneity, as demonstrated in this report on the multilingual project of the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) in the Chinese language, which has been a collaboration between the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Culture and the Getty Research Institute for more than a decade. After a brief overview of the project, the paper will introduce a holistic methodology for considering how to enable (...) Western art to be accessible to Chinese users and Chinese art accessible to Western users. The conceptual and structural issues will be discussed, especially the challenges of developing terminology in two different cultures. For instance, some terms shared by Western and Chinese cultures could be understood differently in each culture, which raises questions regarding their locations within the hierarchical structure of the AAT. Finally, the report will provide cases to demonstrate how the Chinese-Language AAT language supports online exhibitions, digital humanities and linking of digital art history content to the web of data. (shrink)

Facet analysis is an established methodology for building classifications and subject indexing systems, but has been less rigorously applied to thesauri. The process of creating a compatible thesaurus from the schedules of the Bliss Bibliographic Classification 2nd edition highlights the ways in which the conceptual relationships in a subject field are handled in the two types of retrieval languages. An underlying uniformity of theory is established, and the way in which software can manage the relationships is discussed. The manner (...) of displaying verbal expressions of concepts (vocabulary control) is also considered, but is found to be less well controlled in the classification than in the thesaurus. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that facet analysis provides a sound basis for structuring a variety of knowledge organization tools. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problems of terminology in the contemporary pop vocal pedagogy field. In the course of the research, which has been conducted from the standpoint of the principle of cultural-conformity, we identified the essence of the concept “contemporary pop vocal-performing thesaurus”, highlighted its structure, and represented the thesaurus in the form of an ontology. The contemporary pop vocal-performing thesaurus as a form of personal activity has a cognitive and creative essence and constitutes an (...) individual professional resource for a performer. As a pedagogical category it is a thematically organized and practically tested outcome of teaching a pop vocalist holistically, and is a renewable interaction of all its components. It consists of cognitive, vocal-technical, artistic-technological, communicative, interpretive, and artistic-figurative components. We note that the artistic-figurative and interpretive components are fully demonstrated in the co-connection of all other components, and reflect the specificity of our concept. We outline some characteristic features of contemporary pop music, the specific components of contemporary non-classical vocal techniques, and modes of presentation of musical information, which are used in the process of forming the contemporary pop vocal-performing thesaurus. We emphasize that the results of our research enable modification of the educational process in the context of contemporary pop vocal, by means of its updating and supplementing with unconventional approaches, principles and methods. Despite the fact that our study primarily concerns the problems of Ukrainian pedagogy we think that its main provisions can apply to the development of methods for teaching pop singing in any country of the world. (shrink)