SIS - TMS: A Thesaurus Management System for Distributed Digital Collections

The availability of central reference information as thesauri is critical for correct intellectual access to distributed databases, in particular to digital collections in international networks. There is a continuous raise in interest in thesauri, and several thesaurus management systems have appeared on the market. The issue, how to integrate effectively such central resources into a multitude of client systems and to maintain the consistency of reference in an information network has not yet been satisfactorily solved. We present here a method and an actual thesaurus management system, which is specifically designed for this use, and implements the necessary data structures and management functions. The system handles multiple multilingual thesauri and can be adapted to all semantic thesaurus structures currently in use. Consistency-critical information is kept as history of changes in the form of backward differences. The system has been installed at several sites in Europe.