Abstract:
A thesaurus is a useful knowledge organization tool. Growing globalization of information exchange calls for multi-lingual inter-disciplinary thesauri for use in information processing and retrieval. This paper discusses the authors’ experiences of designing and developing online bilingual thesauri for subjects mainly in the humanities: Tamil-English thesaurus for ‘classical Tamil studies’ and compares with earlier work on Farsi-Vedic Sanskrit-English thesaurus for ‘religious mysticism.’ Building corpus of terms, selection of terms, identification of relationships among concepts, structure and hyperlinking for surfing, special problems of synonyms and homonyms, determining equivalence and near-equivalence of terms in Tamil and English, Indexing of Tamil and English terms and searching are discussed. The formation of dynamic webs of related terms through hyper-linking is mentioned.