Knowledge Representation in the Spiritual and Cultural Domains

Knowledge organization systems such as thesauri are intended to structure and represent concepts in a domain in a manner that facilitates their effective employment in knowledge representation, i.e. representation of subjects of information resources (Classification and indexing) and users’ queries (search and retrieval). Representation of ‘aboutness’ of a discourse and of the concepts in it is, to some extent, a function of the nature and characteristics of the ‘domain’. Design of multilingual thesauri for multicultural domains such as ‘spirituality’ present many problems – both structural and semantic. Based on the experience in working on two multilingual thesauri in culture-specific domains, the principal issues that arise have been identified and illustrated with a few examples. The strategies that have been adopted to overcome the problems are also explained. A few general principles that could serve as guidelines in building multilingual thesauri especially in culture-specific domains have been suggested.