The Term Development in the Thesauri of International Organisations

Abstract

This paper analyses the use of the term development in five online thesauri of international organisations: AGROVOC (Food and Agriculture Organisation), EUROVOC (European Union), OECD MACROTHESAURUS (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), UNBIS (United Nations) and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). The main objective of this work is to stimulate thoughts about the cultural value placed on terminology in a multicultural environment. By applying conceptual tools based on philosophical and anthropological knowledge we wish to elucidate the peculiarity of the tool thesaurus in terms of culture. The results we have obtained show that the use of the term development is strictly related to a precise modality of knowledge's arrangement, based on regulating codes that are the results of a historical period and cultural pattern rather than a single definitive assertion. Dans le pr�sent travail, nous nous proposons d'analyser le sens du terme de d�veloppement dans cinq thesauri mis en ligne par des organisations internationales, AGROVOC (FAO), EUROVOC (Union europ�enne), MACROTHESAURUS de l'OCDE (Organisation de coop�ration et de d�veloppement �conomique), UNBIS (Nations unies) et UNESCO (Organisations des nations unies pour l'�ducation, la science et la culture). Notre principal objectif est de stimuler la r�flexion sur la valeur culturelle d'une terminologie dans un environnement multiculturel. En utilisant des outils conceptuels mis au point � partir de notions philosophiques et anthropologiques, nous essayons de caract�riser la dimension culturelle de l'outil �thesaurus�. Nos r�sultats montrent que l'utilisation du terme de d�veloppement est �troitement li�e � un mode d'articulation pr�cis des connaissances sous forme de codes de r�gulation qui rel�vent plut�t d'une p�riode historique et d'un mod�le culturel donn�s que d'une d�finition universelle et d�finitive.

Geomatic Concepts in Agriculture Thesauri

“…Selected terms were processed by both descriptive and quantitative methods to test their occurrence in thesauri, similarity and position in the hierarchy of thesauri. To the comparison there are used descriptive methods of graphical scheme of hierarchies (based on broader and narrower concepts, which are the key components of SKOS standard) and other relations such as related concepts (similarly to Severino, 2007). Concepts were also processed by quantitative methods focused on computation of similarity using Formal Concepts Analysis (Wille, 1992), which is described with use of mathematical structures in Kavouras, Kokla (2007).…”

Linked Forests: Semantic similarity of geographical concepts “forest”

“…Holanda in [22] points out that "thesaurus is one, out of many, possible representation of term (or word) connectivity". The other de nition [23] speci es types of relations in thesauri "A thesaurus is mainly a controlled vocabulary -a domain-speci c vocabulary, made up of terms not words that are linked to one another by Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/8/18 6:02 AM cross-referencing". Other de nitions and the evolution of the thesaurus concept are described in [24].…”

“…BT broader term, NT narrower term and RT related term), which are employed reciprocally." [23]. It is necessary to mention that modern thesauri such as examples used in this research (see the section Methods) constitute an integral component of the Linked Data cloud (see linkeddata.org), because contained terms and concepts are usually linked to other thesauri and semantic tools.…”

On the evaluation of thesaurus tools compatible with the Semantic Web

“…(3) Functionalities: each tool offers its own set of functionalities. The set selected included functionalities that either are common in thesaurus tools known by the authors, or which were considered relevant in previous analyses of what thesaurus tools should offer [16,17], or emerged from the needs that motivated the definition of this framework. Thus, the final set considered is:…”

“…While tool improvement requires a high degree of exhaustiveness in tests in order to detect any weaknesses that should be tuned, tool users are not normally inclined to use comprehensive tests in selecting a tool, as these may become overwhelming because of their extent. In addition, other works consisting of surveys of thesaurus users [16] or the evaluation of various functionalities [18] were taken into account as complementary guidance.…”