Does the traditional thesaurus have a place in modern information retrieval? By Birger Hjørland Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. Email: Abstract The introduction (1) of this article considers the status of the thesaurus within LIS and ask about the future prospect for thesauri. The main following points are: (2) Any knowledge organization system (KOS) is today threatened by Google-like systems, and it is therefore important to consider if there still is a need for knowledge organization (KO) in the traditional sense. (3) A thesaurus is a somewhat reduced form of KOS compared to, for example, an ontology, and its "bundling" and restricted number of semantic relations has never been justified theoretically or empirically. Which semantic relations are most fruitful for a given task is thus an open question and different domains may need different kinds of KOS including different sets of relations between terms. (4) A KOS is a controlled vocabulary (CV) and should not be considered a “perfect language” (Eco 1995) that is simply able to remove the ambiguity of natural language; rather much ambiguity in language represents a battle between many “voices” (Bakhtin 1981) or “paradigms” (Kuhn 1962). In this perspective, a specific KOS, e.g. a specific thesaurus, is just one "voice" among many voices, and
could choose instead of or as well as his/her original terms(s). (See ISO 25964-1 clause 10.3.1) This function is very different from the inferencing applications and other automated functions that might be expected of an ontology. You refer to "bundling" of semantic relations, by which I guess you mean the thesaural practice of giving many distinct semantic relationships the same "RT" label. This would never do in an ontology, where (for example) the semantics of "apple tree isDamagedBy canker" must be distinguished from "canker isTreatedWith octithilinone" if a computer is to instruct the grower in how to protect his crop. But a knowledgeable human searcher faced with "canker RT apple tree" and "canker RT octithilinone" has no difficulty deciding whether "apple tree" or "octithilinone" is more relevant to his enquiry, and so no need for the type of relationship to be specified.” (Dextre Clarke 2015-06-10; informal communication). Before considering the arguments in this quote it should be mentioned that Kless et al also speak in support of the thesaurus principles, thus, for example: “[W]hole-part relationships and associative relationships in thesauri appear to describe a kind of prototypical reality—one that describes the things in their idealized—that is, “common,” “usual,” or ”normal”—form. Sometimes, the associative relationships also appear to express experience or things that are noteworthy in some context, such as “Fertilizers cause soil pollution.” Thesauri use the relationships in this way because they (a) allow navigating the concepts of a thesaurus, (b) guide the indexer and searcher in selecting indexing/search terms, or (c) serve other purposes of information retrieval
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