Multilingual Thesaurus Research Articles

A prototype system for multilingual data discovery of International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) Network data

Shared ecological data have the potential to revolutionize ecological research just as shared genetic sequence data have done for biological research. However, for ecological data to be useful, it must first be discoverable. A broad-scale research topic may require that a researcher be able to locate suitable data from a variety of global, regional and national data providers, which often use different local languages to describe their data. Thus, one of the challenges of international sharing of long-term data is facilitation of multilingual searches. Such searches are hindered by lack of equivalent terms across languages and by uneven application of keywords in ecological metadata. To test whether a thesaurus-based approach to multilingual data searching might be effective, we implemented a prototype web-services-based system for searching International Long-Term Ecological Research Network data repositories. The system builds on the use of a multilingual thesaurus to make searches more complete than would be obtained through search term-translation alone. The resulting system, when coupled to commodity online translation systems, demonstrates the possibility of achieving multilingual searches for ecological data.

Automatic medical image multilingual annotation via a medical social network

Medical social networking sites enabled multimedia content sharing in large volumes, by allowing physicians and patients to upload their medical images. These images are diagnosed and commented, in different languages, by several specialists instantly. Moreover, it is necessary to employ new techniques, in order to automatically extract information and analyze knowledge from the huge number of comments expressing specialist’s analyzes and recommendations. For this reason, we propose a terms-based method in order to extract the relevant terms and words which can describe the medical image. Furthermore, significant extracted terms and keywords will be used later to index medical images, in order to facilitate their search through the social network site. In fact, we need to take account that existing comments are expressed in different languages. So, it is essential to implement a multilingual indexation method to eliminate the ambiguity which will be the cause of the effectiveness’s reduction of the search function. In order to palliate this situation, we propose a multilingual mixed approach which concentrates on algorithms based on statistical methods and external multilingual semantic resources, in order to handle and to cover different languages. The use of external resources, such as semantic multilingual thesaurus, can improve the efficiency of the indexing process. The proposed method can be applied in different languages. Our study is validated by a set of experiments and a comparison study with some existing approaches in literature. Experimental results have indicated that the proposed system has a superior performance compared to other systems. Finally, we need also to verify whether the system is considered by the specialists as a potential aid. We evaluate its impact, by inquiring the specialists about the degree of confidence in our system. By analyzing the obtained results, we can argue that the proposed system presented a high acceptance and viability rate regarding the specialists’ interests in the annotation practice domain.

Enhanced Artificial Social Cockroaches (EASC) for Modern Information Retrieval

This article deals on an improved version of the recently developed Artificial Social Cockroaches (ASC) algorithm based on several modifications. The EASC has as input a set of artificial cockroaches and N selected shelters. It is based on a random displacement step and a set of operators (selection cockroaches, shelter attraction, congener's attraction, shelter permutation). Each cockroach must be hidden in the shelter where it feels safer (evaluation function). In the recent years with the coming of the world wide web, the amount of unstructured documents available in the digital society increases and becomes easily accessible, all this has led that satisfy the needs of users in terms of relevant information has become a substantial problem in the scientific community. The second component of the authors' study is to apply the algorithm (EASC) as an information retrieval system using multilingual pre-processing and thesaurus to solve the problems of multilingual query and searching with synonymy. The relevant documents will be rendered as a list of ranked and classified documents from the most relevant to the least relevant. Lastly the authors apply the benchmark Medline and a series of valuation measures (precision, recall, f-measure, entropy, error, accuracy, specificity, TCR, ROC) for the experimentation, also they have compared their results with the outcomes of set of existed systems (social worker bees, taboo search, genetic algorithm, simulating annealing, naïve method). The third component of the authors' system is the visualization step that ensures the presentation of the result in the form of a cobweb with some realism to be understandable by users.

Towards an “Internet of Food”: Food Ontologies for the Internet of Things

Automated food and drink recognition methods connect to cloud-based lookup databases (e.g., food item barcodes, previously identified food images, or previously classified NIR (Near Infrared) spectra of food and drink items databases) to match and identify a scanned food or drink item, and report the results back to the user. However, these methods remain of limited value if we cannot further reason with the identified food and drink items, ingredients and quantities/portion sizes in a proposed meal in various contexts; i.e., understand from a semantic perspective their types, properties, and interrelationships in the context of a given user’s health condition and preferences. In this paper, we review a number of “food ontologies”, such as the Food Products Ontology/FOODpedia (by Kolchin and Zamula), Open Food Facts (by Gigandet et al.), FoodWiki (Ontology-driven Mobile Safe Food Consumption System by Celik), FOODS-Diabetes Edition (A Food-Oriented Ontology-Driven System by Snae Namahoot and Bruckner), and AGROVOC multilingual agricultural thesaurus (by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization—FAO). These food ontologies, with appropriate modifications (or as a basis, to be added to and further expanded) and together with other relevant non-food ontologies (e.g., about diet-sensitive disease conditions), can supplement the aforementioned lookup databases to enable progression from the mere automated identification of food and drinks in our meals to a more useful application whereby we can automatically reason with the identified food and drink items and their details (quantities and ingredients/bromatological composition) in order to better assist users in making the correct, healthy food and drink choices for their particular health condition, age, body weight/BMI (Body Mass Index), lifestyle and preferences, etc.

Developing SKOS-Compliant Multilingual Thesaurus: An ISO 25964 Based Approach

Standards are being used for construction of thesauri from their inceptions. Previously thesauri were designed and maintained manually. But the advancement of ICT gives us the opportunity to execute the same through machine-readable environment. To incorporate thesaurus database electronically, the thesaurus standards also changed accordingly over the time. Concept of data model has emerged for efficient utili2ation of knowledge organization systems like classification schemes, subject taxonomies and thesauri. New standards are enable to guide in designing and maintaining thesaurus in digital environment and also make them interoperable among various platforms by using SKOS as domain model and XML as lingua fianca. The SKOS-compatible thesaurus standard also supports multilinguality in Unicode based data processing environment. ISO-25964 standards are designed in two parts for constructing and maintaining a SKOS complaint multilingual thesaurus

EnvThs: a controlled vocabulary service application for environmental data

In this paper we present a controlled vocabulary service application (CVSA) that we primarily developed in semantic support for the Environmental Data Store (EDS), but also as an access point for other controlled vocabularies that are commonly used in the environmental field. We use a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) implementation for the representation of the controlled vocabularies associated with the EDS in addition to those others that we placed side by side. The EDS controlled vocabularies were created as an amalgamation of eight commonly used vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies in the geoscience/environmental informatics community. From these, ten top concepts were selected or defined as the base of our classification system. We deploy the TemaTres, implementation of SKOS which is an open-source, web –based thesaurus management package to create and manage our EDS vocabularies. TemaTresView and VisualVocabulary tools that work well with TemaTres are also integrated in the application to provide tree view and graphical view of the vocabulary structure. The open source edition of Virtuoso Universal Server is used to provide a Web interface in support of SPARQL queries against the EDS controlled vocabularies. Replicas of some of the key vocabularies commonly used in the community are also maintained as part of the application, such as the General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET), and the NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Standard Names. The application has been deployed as an elementary and experimental prototype that can be accessed at http://edscvs.ccny.cuny.edu .

Geo-Enrichment and Semantic Enhancement of Metadata Sets to Augment Discovery in Geoportals

Geoportals are established to function as main gateways to find, evaluate, and start “using” geographic information. Still, current geoportal implementations face problems in optimizing the discovery process due to semantic heterogeneity issues, which leads to low recall and low precision in performing text-based searches. Therefore, we propose an enhanced semantic discovery approach that supports multilingualism and information domain context. Thus, we present workflow that enriches existing structured metadata with synonyms, toponyms, and translated terms derived from user-defined keywords based on multilingual thesauri and ontologies. To make the results easier and understandable, we also provide automated translation capabilities for the resource metadata to support the user in conceiving the thematic content of the descriptive metadata, even if it has been documented using a language the user is not familiar with. In addition, to text-enable spatial filtering capabilities, we add additional location name keywords to metadata sets. These are based on the existing bounding box and shall tweak discovery scores when performing single text line queries. In order to improve the user’s search experience, we tailor faceted search strategies presenting an enhanced query interface for geo-metadata discovery that are transparently leveraging the underlying thesauri and ontologies.

Multilingual query expansion in the SveMed+ bibliographic database: A case study

SveMed+ is a bibliographic database covering Scandinavian medical journals. It is produced by the University Library of Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The bibliographic references are indexed with terms from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus. The MeSH has been translated into several languages, including Swedish, making it suitable as the basis for multilingual tools in the medical field. The data structure of SveMed+ closely mimics that of PubMed/MEDLINE. Users of PubMed/MEDLINE and similar databases typically expect retrieval features that are not readily available off-the-shelf. The SveMed+ interface is based on a free text search engine (Solr) and a relational database management system (Microsoft SQL Server) containing the bibliographic database and a multilingual thesaurus database. The thesaurus database contains medical terms in three different languages and information about relationships between the terms. A combined approach involving the Solr free text index, the bibliographic database and the thesaurus database allowed the implementation of functionality such as automatic multilingual query expansion, faceting and hierarchical explode searches. The present paper describes how this was done in practice.

Panel: Knowledge organization systems (KOS) as linked data services

Knowledge organization systems (KOS) are the key elements for interlinking the values of Linked Data datasets. Existing KOS products (including well-known thesauri and classification systems) need to be transformed into the constructs of Linked Data services, much more beyond what a traditional thesaurus or classification were/are developed, but how? What can these Linked Data KOS bring to various information services? The panelists will share their experiences and lessons learned. The presentation starts from the processes that have been developed to build, maintain, and publish a newly derived taxonomy using W3C SKOS standard, to make it extensible and scalable to support new information services in scholarly publishing workflow. The next presentation will share experiences and lessons learned from the implementation of a platform built for publishing and distribution of multiple KOS and for automatic indexing using these KOS. The third case is a Linked Data bibliographic service, a RDF-aware system and a mash up application which relies on the use of a multilingual thesaurus that has been published and maintained as a Linked Data dataset, and has been mapped to more than ten KOS. For the datasets that have not used standardized KOS, the panel will present methods that can be applied when generating or deriving project-focused micro-thesauri from the Linked Data KOS and give an overview of the use cases of Linked Data KOS in information services.

Automated Thesaurus Management in a Networked Environment

From the 1994 CAIS Conference: The Information Industry in Transition McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. May 25 - 27, 1994.While institutional members of an information network may share the use of a common thesaurus, most institutions will need to make additions or changes to the thesaurus based on their particular requirements. Automated thesaurus management systems have not usually taken into account the needs for such local adaptations. While the requirements for networked thesaurus management are complex, it is possible, even in a simple microcomputer-based environment, to meet a significant number of those requirements with a few simple functions. This paper describes basic requirements for managing thesauri in networks, and the means by which these requirements are supported in a specific microcomputer-based multilingual thesaurus system.

Survey of domestic food purchases and related home handling practices in the Abruzzo region (central Italy): Data collection and analysis through a language-independent classification system

A telephone survey was carried out on 13,486 randomly selected households located in the Abruzzo region (central Italy). Three questionnaires were specifically designed in relation to three different groups of foods (Meat and meat products, Fishery products, Fruit and vegetables). Questions were mainly focused on the amount and number of purchases, type of retailer, and home food handling practices with respect to the week prior to the interview. Data were classified according to a multilingual thesaurus system (LanguaL). Results allowed to estimate domestic purchases (in kg) per capita for different food categories. The category “Red meat/Cattle” accounted for a large part of purchases in the “meat and meat products” group (10.9 kg per capita/year; 32.2% of purchases in the group) while the category “Fish or related organism/Fish” was the most purchased in the “fishery products” group (6.9 kg per capita/year; 63.3%). The aggregation of more detailed characteristics enabled the identification of popular categories of foods, such as “Red meat/Cattle/Divided into pieces” (25% of the “meat and meat products” group). Significant differences (p < 0.05) were found between the four different provinces (L'Aquila, Chieti, Pescara and Teramo) with respect to “Poultry/Chicken” and “Red meat/Cattle” categories. Householders were also asked about post-purchase food handling practices that might be hazardous to food safety. More than 20% of those surveyed stated that they thawed frozen meat at room temperature. The degree of doneness after cooking of different food categories was generally high: over 90% of products purchased in the majority of meat and fish categories were properly cooked. However a noticeable proportion of householders (about 15%) reported medium or rare cooking of “Red meat/Cattle” and “Red meat/Swine”. Differences (p < 0.05) were also found between consumers of different ages, with people over 65 years old being more prone to freeze meat and cook it thoroughly.The survey was carried out in a specific geographic area and on a statistically significant sample of households, thus allowing a collection of data on domestic habits relating to food purchases and home food handling practices. This information should be included in the framework of quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) models as a measure of the actual exposure of consumers to pathogenic microorganism. The LanguaL system also proved to be a practical language-independent method useful not only to identify and describe food items but also to classify them according to specific food safety characteristics.

An outline of compilation and processing of metadata in agricultural database management system WebAgris

ABSTRACTThe paper tackles international information system for agriculture Agris and local processing of metadata with database management software WebAgris. Operations are coordinated by the central repository at the FAO in Rome. Based on international standards and unified methodology, national and regional centers collect and process local publications, and then send the records to the central unit, which enables global website accessibility of the data. Earlier DOS-run application was based on package Agrin CDS/ISIS. The Current package WebAgris runs on web servers. Database construction tools and instructions are accessible on FAO Web pages. Data are entered through unified input masks. International consistency is achieved through authority control of certain elements, such as author or corporate affiliation. Central authority control is made available for subject headings, such as descriptors and subject categories. Subject indexing is based on controlled multilingual thesaurus Agrovoc, also available freely on the Internet. This glossary has become an important tool in the area of the international agricultural ontology. The data are exported to the central unit in XML format. Global database is currently eccessible to everyone. This international cooperative information network combines elements of a document repository, electronic publishing, open archiving and full text open access. Links with Google Scholar provide a good possibility for international promotion of publishing.

Multilingual Thesaurus and Interoperability

This paper briefly describes a pilot project to design and develop a multilingual- English and eight other languages of India – thesaurus for ‘Education’. The thesaurus is derived from the bilingual (English-Kannada) Colon Classification (CC), (Ed. 7 revised). The CC number and Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) number are metadata in the thesaurus structure. The thesaurus for each language is separately built using Greenstone Digital Library software. The descriptors are hyperlinked. Descriptor terms, terms in the Scope Note (text), CC and DDC numbers are indexed. Two or more of the thesauri can be searched simultanseously. The advantages of using class number in the search and retrieval are mentioned. Other issues discussed include interoperability as key to effective interlinking among knowledge organising tools (KOTs) and in integrating two or more KOTs, and issues and problems in building multilingual thesaurus (thesauri) with particular reference to the cultural frames and languages of India. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/djlit.33.4883

Conceptual Database Retrieval through Multilingual Thesauri

In traditional database management systems, information retrieval is often carried out using keywords contained within fields of each record. Because a term (concept) can be expressed in several ways, a significant number of records are ignored by the free text techniques which use only a posteriori relations between terms. This paper proposes the utilisation of a priori relations between terms that exist independently of any documents through a controlled vocabulary known as thesaurus, which incorporates both terms and the relations among them. The paper discusses the integration of multilingual thesauri in the set-theoretic FDB (Frame DataBase) data model, which offers by default a universal schema for all applications. All changes to the structure of the logical-level database schema can be carried out by modifying the appropriate metadata. The purpose of this extension is for the database user to be able to apply queries on a database using information through multilingual thesauri. This approach extends the FDB model so that users can apply queries to the database using both a priori and a posteriori relationships. Apart from free text retrieval and conceptual the proposed structure enables multilingual searching independently of the language used to store data itself.

The AGROVOC Linked Dataset

Born in the early 1980's as a multilingual agricultural thesaurus, AGROVOC has steadily evolved over the last fifteen years, moving to an electronic version around the year 2000, and embracing the Semantic Web shortly thereafter. Today AGROVOC is a SKOS-XL concept scheme published as Linked Open Data, containing links as well as backlinks and references to many other Linked Datasets in the LOD cloud. In this paper we provide a brief historical summary of AGROVOC and detail its specification as a Linked Dataset.

Language and culture representativeness in multilingual thesauri development

Summary Multilingual thesauri have the potential to play a key role in a worldwide information exchange process enabling information indexing and retrieval. A key issue identified in their building procedures is the management of the semantics of the terms and of the relationships through the different languages of the multilingual thesaurus. Two possible approaches in developing the semantic structure of the different linguistic versions have been analyzed in the light of selected examples/case studies, acknowledging pros and cons. In a symmetrically structured thesaurus each language version has a same relational pattern and concepts are assumed to be practically identical across different languages. In a non-symmetrical semantic structure, instead, languages, i.e. cultures, are admitted to differ and semantic structures diverge whenever discrepancies are identified, allowing in this way a better language and culture representativeness.

Exploration and study of multilingual thesauri automation construction for digital libraries in China

PurposeThe paper aims to explore multilingual thesauri automation construction based on the freely available digital library resources. The key methods and study results are presented in the paper. It also proposes a way that terms are automatically extracted from multilingual parallel corpus.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopted the technology of natural language processing to analyze the linguistics characteristics of terms, and combined this with statistical analyses to extract the terms from technological documents. The methods consist of automatically extracting and filtering terms, judging and building relationship among terms, building the multilingual parallel corpus, and extracting term pairs between Chinese and foreign languages through calculating their associated probability. The experiments run on the Java test platform.FindingsThe study obtains the following conclusions: finding the similarities and differences between the Chinese thesaurus standard and international thesaurus standard. The methods for automatically extracting terms and building relationships among them are presented. Eventually the multilingual terms' translation sets are generated based on real corpora. The results of the study show that the proposed methods can obtain better performance. The effect of automatic terms' translation alignment method is better than that of traditional IBM model method.Practical implicationsThe study results can provide references for further study and application of multilingual thesauri automation construction using Chinese as a pivot.Originality/valueThe paper proposes new ideas on thesaurus automation construction in the digital age. The presented method based on linguistics and statistics is a new attempt. According to the experimental results, this exploration and study is innovative and valuable. In addition, these ideas and methods give a good start for improving information services of the PRC's National Science and Technology Digital Library.

Interactive visualization for multilingual search

AbstractEditor's SummaryMultilingual thesauri provide the context for exploring experimental user interfaces that support interactive visualization. The authors created two search interfaces that draw on the semantic richness of bilingual thesauri and provide for search, browse and results display. The Searchling interface offers search, browsable navigation and the full term‐record data for a selected term, as well as a simple switch between language views. It provides active user assistance by displaying options to broaden or narrow search. User evaluation showed Searchling to be easy to use, appealing broadly but especially to linear thinkers. The T‐Saurus interface is more visual, with term search results represented by the size, number, proximity and opacity of buckets. Terms can be displayed in multiple languages simultaneously, and multiple terms can be chosen to form a query to retrieve documents. Visual thinkers appreciated its dynamic and interactive visualization interface. Studies demonstrate the support both interfaces provide for fully using rich, multilingual thesauri as well as differences for users with different cognitive styles.

Thesaurus maintenance, alignment and publication as linked data: the AGROVOC use case

The AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is now published as linked data. In order to reach this goal AGROVOC was expressed in Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) and its concepts provided with dereferenceable URIs. AGROVOC is now aligned with ten other multilingual Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) related to agriculture, using the SKOS properties exact match and close match. Alignments were automatically produced in Eclipse using a custom-designed tool and then validated by a domain expert. The resulting data is publicly available to both humans and machines using a SPARQL endpoint together with a modified version of Pubby, a lightweight front-end tool for publishing linked data. This paper describes the process that led to the current linked data AGROVOC and discusses current and future applications and directions. This paper extends a shorter version presented at MTSR 2011.

A SKOS-based multilingual thesaurus of geological time scale for interoperability of online geological maps

The usefulness of online geological maps is hindered by linguistic barriers. Multilingual geoscience thesauri alleviate linguistic barriers of geological maps. However, the benefits of multilingual geoscience thesauri for online geological maps are less studied. In this regard, we developed a multilingual thesaurus of geological time scale (GTS) to alleviate linguistic barriers of GTS records among online geological maps. We extended the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) model to represent the ordinal hierarchical structure of GTS terms. We collected GTS terms in seven languages and encoded them into a thesaurus by using the extended SKOS model. We implemented methods of characteristic-oriented term retrieval in JavaScript programs for accessing Web Map Services (WMS), recognizing GTS terms, and making translations. With the developed thesaurus and programs, we set up a pilot system to test recognitions and translations of GTS terms in online geological maps. Results of this pilot system proved the accuracy of the developed thesaurus and the functionality of the developed programs. Therefore, with proper deployments, SKOS-based multilingual geoscience thesauri can be functional for alleviating linguistic barriers among online geological maps and, thus, improving their interoperability.