Search thesaurus

Search thesaurus / Search aid thesaurus/End-user thesaurus

Shiri; Revie & Chowdhury (2002) identified three main types of thesauri within information retrieval:

standard manually constructed thesauri (with hierarchical, equivalence and associative relationships).
searching thesauri, also referred to as end-user thesauri (enhanced with a large number of entry terms that are synonyms, quasi-synonyms or term variants which assist end-users to find alternative terms to add to their search queries).
automatically constructed thesauri

The standard thesaurus was originally intended to be used both for indexing and searching purposes. The search thesaurus is thus not a principally different kind of thesaurus.

"Whereas information retrieval had hitherto [until the rise of full-text and the Internet] relied on the indexer and the searcher following mirrored paths, both guided by a network of hierarchical associative and equivalence relationships between terms, a new type of thesaurus began to appear, called loosely a "search thesaurus". Cochrane (1992) compared the two, pointing out that the search thesaurus could be composed of the merging of thesaurus lists; a construct produced, for example, by Knapp (1984) in BRS/TERM, and which had more than a passing resemblance to Roget in that its main characteristic was the clustering of synonyms. " (Gilchrist, 2003, p. 9).

Literature:

Anderson, James D. & Rowley, Frederick A. (1992). Building End-User Thesauri From Full-Text. IN: Barbara H. Kwasnik and Raya Fidel, eds. Advances in Classification Research, Volume 2; Proceedings of the 2nd ASIS SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, October 27, 1991. Medford, NJ: Learned Information, pp. 1-13.

Bates, M. J. (1986). Subject access in online catalogs: a design model. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 37(6), 357-376.

Bates, Marcia J. (1990). Design for a Subject Search Interface and Online Thesaurus for a Very Large Records Management Database." In: American Society for Information Science. Annual Meeting. Proceedings, v.27. Medford, NJ: Learned Information, pp. 20-28.

Cochrane, P. A. (1992). Indexing and searching thesauri, the Janus or Proteus of information retrieval. In N. J. Williamson & M. Hudon (Eds.), Classification Research for Knowledge Representation and Organization: Proceedings of the Fifth International Study Conference on Classification Research. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, pp. 161-178.

Gilchrist, A (2003). Thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies - an etymological note. Journal of Documentation 59(1), 7-18.

Knapp, S .D. (1984). BRS/TERM, a vocabulary database for searchers. Database, 7(4), 70-75.

Knapp, S. D. (1999). The contemporary thesaurus of search terms and synonyms: A guide for natural language computer searching, 2nd edition. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Kristensen, J. (1993). Expanding end-users query statements for free-text searching with a search-aid thesaurus. Information Processing & Management, 29(6), 733-744.

Møller Rasmussen, H. (2004). Søgethesaurussens potentiale ved EU-informationssøgning på WWW. København: Danmarks Biblioteksskole (Speciale).

Perez, E. (1982). Text enhancement: controlled vocabulary vs. free text. Special Libraries, 73, 183-192.

Piternick, A. (1984). Searching vocabularies: a developing category of online searching tools. Online Review, 8(5), 441-449.

Shiri, A. A.; Revie, C. & Chowdhury, G. (2002). Thesaurus-assisted term selection and query expansion: A review of user-centered studies. Knowledge Organization, 29(1), 1-19. Available at: https://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/research/publications/papers/strath_cis_publication_323.pdf