Q: What can thesauri do for the web?
A: Thesauri can enrich the web in several ways.
Thesauri can be used to organise information in a sensible way, which in turn helps us to find what we are looking for on the web. Richer than a simple taxonomy, but simpler than a full blown ontology, thesauri provide a convenient yet powerful way to achieve knowledge organisation. Furthermore, because thesauri have been used for decades by library scientists for the same purpose, there exist a number of extremely well structured, well engineered thesauri in the public domain. Providing the framework for bringing these systems on to the semantic web is a major goal of the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity.
A thesaurus also includes information about terminology, and how different terms may be used to represent different concepts. A thesaurus with rich terminological data can be used to support tasks such as automated classification of documents.
These are two of the ways that thesauri can help significantly reduce the energy barrier that stands before the explosion of the semantic web. By bringing existing knowledge organisation systems into the web, we reduce the effort required in the engineering of ontologies from scratch. And by supporting tasks such as automated document classification, the effort required in generating the metadata that is fundamental to the semantic web is greatly reduced.
Finally, multilingual thesauri provide new opportunities for cross-language interaction via the web.