TML : A Thesaural Markup Language

Thesauri are used to provide controlled vocabularies for resource classification. Their use can greatly assist document discovery because thesauri man date a consistent shared terminology for describing documents. A particular thesaurus classifies documents according to an information community’s needs. As a result, there are many different thesaural schemas. This has led to a proliferation of schema-specific thesaural systems. In our research, we exploit schematic regularities to design a generic thesaural ontology and specify it as a markup language. The language provides a common representational framework in which to encode the idiosyncrasies of specific thesauri. This approach has several advantages: it offers consistent syntax and semantics in which to express thesauri; it allows general purpose thesaural applications to leverage many thesauri; and it supports a single thesaural user interface by which information communities can consistently organise, store and retrieve electronic documents.