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 is “perfect language” (Eco 1995) that simply able to remove the ambiguity of natural language; rather much ambiguity in language represents a battle between or this many “voices” (Bakhtin 1981) “paradigms” (Kuhn 1962). In perspective, a specific KOS, e.g. a specific thesaurus, is just one "voice" among many voices, and
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
Hjorland_.docx