Multilingual thesauri development and application

This paper is about thesauri construction, development standards, applications and maintenance. Thesaurus is a system for vocabulary control, usually for a specific knowledge domain, indicating preferred and nonpreferred terms, and semantic relations between terms; the terms are in natural language. The multilingual relations map two or more languages. There is an international standard for thesauri development-ISO 5964:1985 documentation-guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri. There are two types of relations between terms: Hierarchical relations thesauri are hierarchies with broader/narrower relations structuring the hierarchy and associative relations. A thesaurus is designed for indexing and searching in a specific knowledge domain. Another application of thesaurus is providing meta-descriptions of documents and user personalization in a collaborative informational system. Users of such system who are specialists in a particular field could be engaged in expanding the thesaurus base. XML-based languages for example RDF suit for describing the thesaurus structure. Users can create and modify such XML documents with the help of web-browser which supports XML document object model. During making project Petroleum Engineers Virtual Network the simple thesaurus for "Oil" knowledge domain was developed. This thesaurus corresponds to common standards and satisfies the requirements of knowledge domain.