خلاصة:
Thesaurus is one, out of many, precious tool in information technology by which
information specialists can optimize storage and retrieval of documents in scientific
databases and on the web. In recent years, there has been a shift from thesaurus to
ontology by downgrading thesaurus in favor of ontology. It is because thesaurus
cannot meet the needs of information management because it cannot create a rich
knowledge-based description of documents. It is claimed that the thesaural
relationships are restricted and insufficient. The writers in this paper show that
thesaural relationships are not inadequate and restricted as they are said to be but
quite the opposite they cover all semantic relations and can increase the possibility
of successful storage and retrieval of documents. This study shows that thesauri are
semantically optimal and they cover all lexical relations; therefore, thesauri can
continue as suitable tools for knowledge management.
ملخص الجهاز:
The writers in this paper show that thesaural relationships are not inadequate and restricted as they are said to be but quite the opposite they cover all semantic relations and can increase the possibility of successful storage and retrieval of documents.
This study shows that thesauri are semantically optimal and they cover all lexical relations; therefore, thesauri can continue as suitable tools for knowledge management.
Keywords: Thesaurus, Thesaural Relationships, Lexical Relations, Semantic Relations, Information Storage and Retrieval.
Thesaurus is viewed as a semantic tool representing three different semantic relationships with the purpose of guiding librarians and researchers to the most suitable terms for indexing and searching the concepts of a subject field (Dextre Clarke, 2001).
In this section we will introduce a number of notions that have been used to describe the meaning relations of lexical items and in the next section the semantic relationships of thesaurus will be studied.
The basic semantic relationships of a thesaurus are three relations: equivalency, hierarchy and association (ANSI, 2005).
Associative words are conceptually, semantically or cognitively related; therefore, including them in thesauri can optimize indexing and retrieval (Broughton, 2006; ANSI, 2005).
The result is that the semantic relations of the thesaurus, equivalency, hierarchy and association are not limited and they cover all lexical relations.
The implementation of more specific lexical relations other than thesaural relations in thesaurus construction and use cannot increase the degree of information storage and retrieval.