Construction and evolution of a Chinese Information Science and Information Service (CIS&IS) onto-thesaurus

Thesauri are the most important tools for information and knowledge organization, and they undergo regular improvements according to the rapid development of new requirements and affordances of emerging information techniques. This paper attempts to integrate ontology into the conceptual organization scheme of thesauri and proposes a new solution to extend the functionality of thesauri based on ontological features, which is termed here as an onto-thesaurus. In this study, a prototype system named the Chinese Information Science and Information Service onto-thesaurus system (CIS&IS), was developed to analyze ontothesaurus with the category of information science and information service in the Chinese Topic Classification Dictionary with a two-stage approach. The first stage aims to define and construct the onto-thesaurus. The second stage aims to realize the evolution function of onto-thesaurus. The main purpose of this system was to achieve the function of self-learning and auto-evolution and to enable a much more effective conceptual retrieval by the newly proposed onto-thesaurus.