AN OBJECT-BASED APPROACH TO MANAGING DOMAIN SPECIFIC THESAURI: SEMIAUTOMATIC THESAURUS CONSTRUCTION AND QUERY-BASED BROWSING

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new approach for managing domain specific thesauri, where object-oriented paradigm is applied to thesaurus construction and query-based browsing. The approach provides an object-oriented mechanism to assist domain experts in constructing thesauri; it determines a considerable part of relationship degrees between terms by inheritance and supplies the domain expert with information available from other parts of the thesaurus being constructed or already constructed. In addition to that, it enables domain experts to incrementally construct the thesaurus, since the automatically determined relationship degrees can be refined whenever a more sophisticated thesaurus is needed. It may minimize domain experts' burden caused by the exhaustive specification of individual relationship. This approach also provides a query-based browsing facility, which enables users to find desired thesaurus terms without tedious browsing in the thesaurus. A browsing query can be formulated with terms rather ambiguous, yet capable of deriving the desired terms. This browsing query is useful especially when users want precise results. In other words, it is useful when they want to use only thesaurus terms carefully selected in reformulating Boolean queries. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we fully implemented an object-based thesaurus system, which supports the semiautomatic thesaurus construction and the query-based browsing facility.