Constructing a Thesaurus

This course is based on Aslib's public course Constructing a Thesaurus

The purpose of this course is to give participants the understanding and skills necessary for them to construct a thesaurus, having decided on the appropriateness of a thesaurus for a particular purpose, and the best form of such a thesaurus.

On completion of this course, participants should be able to:

• understand what a thesaurus is, how and why it is useful, and how it compares to other tools for information retrieval
• decide when a thesaurus is appropriate, and what form it should take
• create an overall structure for a thesaurus
• collect terms, and put them into thesaurus form
• add inter-term relations and term information
• choose and create appropriate thesaurus displays
• plan for the construction and maintenance of a full thesaurus, and choose software aids

The material has been fully revised, and is compatible with the 2005 British Standard BS8723-2:2005 'Structured vocabularies for information retrieval - thesauri'.

Participants follow the course individually, with the assistance of Dr David Bawden as course tutor.

All materials are supplied in electronic form. Participants will need e-mail and web access, and a word processor; no specialised software is required.

The course is divided into eight sessions, each including session notes, a worked example, internet thesaurus examples and recommended reading, and an exercise for participants to complete and send to the tutor for feedback. The sessions cover: thesaurus basics; preliminary analysis; getting the overall structure; collecting terms in thesaurus form; adding term relations; adding term information; displaying the thesaurus; maintaining and updating the thesaurus.

From the time participants start the course, they have three months to complete it. Most participants will take, on average, between 2 and 3 hours to complete each session.

On successful completion of the course participants will have understanding, and a little experience, of all of the stages of thesaurus construction.