Thesaurus federations: loosely integrated thesauri for document retrieval in networks based on Internet technologies

As a result of the distribution of interrelated information over several different information systems, the interconnection of information systems has increased in recent years. However, a purely technical interconnection is insufficient for users who need to find their way to information they are looking for. Thesauri are a proven means to identify documents, e.g., books of interest in a library. For different domains, different thesauri are available, which can be used in information systems as well, e.g., for the indexing and retrieval of data objects. Thus, the interconnection of information systems raises the need to integrate related thesauri. Furthermore, recent advances in open interoperability technologies (World Wide Web, CORBA, and Java) offer the potential for completely new technical solutions for employing thesauri. This paper presents an approach for integrating multiple thesaurus databases. It concentrates on the integration of distributed and heterogeneous thesaurus databases and the integration of multilingual and monolingual thesauri. The software architecture takes advantage of the most advanced Internet and CORBA technology currently available in public domain and in commercial implementations.