Thesauri merging is the activity of consolidating a set of thesauri into a thesaurus which accommodates the vocabularies and the structure of all thesauri being merged. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for monolingual thesauri merging. We also present a domain independent set-theoretic model for the representation of terms, relationships, and integrity constraints. Finally, we presenta method for the merging of monolingual thesauri focusing on its mechemisms for the detection of equivalent terms among the thesauri being merged. Our method expands previous work on the problem; we introduce equivalence asaumpt ions that express similarity between terms and we propose a term distance model which can be used to guide the confirmation or rejection of equivalence assumptions.

Corporate memories (stored information and internal processes) in both private and public organizations grow at an exponential rate. This growth is not only quantitative but also qualitative, in the form of increasing interdependencies between processes and information bits. Although the quantitative growth is relatively easy to handle, increasing information complexity is constantly pushing existing information systems to their limits. It is slowly becoming a self-proving fact that organizations will have to transition from the traditional model of searchable/updatable repositories of "facts and figures" to self-organizing, self-adapting corporate knowledge management systems. Ontologies and Semantic Web principles are the most promising relevant technology, now entering their mature age, allowing the creation of extensible vocabularies able to describe any semantic area. Project ONTO-LOGGING is an attempt to harness the full potential of ontologies as a flexible tool of knowledge management within any knowledge-driven organization, such as corporations and public administrations .