Page 100 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

WU Wenna & BAO Xiulin / The architecture and data model of the National Thesauri Warehouse 099

thesauri still exist in print, they need sufficient management, and are truly not able to be utilized
in practice. Hence, it is both urgent and important to integrate existing thesauri by establishing
a National Thesauri Warehouse (NTW), through which all thesaurus resources in China can be
revisited, revised and improved, so that they can be practically applicable in the future. Based
on these premises, the authors successfully performed a research project entitled “Research on
Construction Mode and Development Mechanism of the National Thesauri Warehouse”. This
project was approved and sponsored by the National Social Science Foundation of China in 2013.
NTW is an integrated service system of all existing thesauri in China. Its main tasks include:
1) digitalizing and preserving Chinese thesauri from all disciplines and providing web services
to make them easily accessible and utilizable; 2) resolving a lack of interoperatability between
thesauri in order to promote the sharing of information resources; 3) providing data services for
information organization at all semantic levels, as well as offering semantic resources and technical
services for the development of special thesauri applications.

1 Studies on thesauri integration systems in China and at abroad

Different thesauri have different knowledge structures, adopt different description patterns,
use different languages, and cover different domains. Therefore, the more thesauri there are,
the compatibility problem between multiple thesauri become more severe. In the early 1990s,
Fu Lansheng (1991) and Zhu Yan (1991) suggested in their articles that it was possible and
necessary to develop NTW for the purpose of resolving thesauri compatibility problems. Back
then, the NTW proposed in their articles had the following features: first, “only normalized
descriptors are included, while relations between terms are unnecessary to be contained (Fu,
1991, pp.257-264)”; second, “a category system should be developed not only using consistent
and unified standards, but also according to the Chinese Books and Document Classification
as well as to international classifications (Zhu, 1991, pp.15-17)”. In the recent 20 years, some
representative studies and practice projects have been performed. Some can provide useful
implications and thus presented.
(1) HILT project
In the High Level Thesaurus (HILT) project (“High Level Thesaurus”, 2000), Dewey Decimal
Classification (DDC) was used as a mapping center to connect 15 different vocabularies, such
as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNISCO) Thesaurus, Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAI). It is expected
that interoperability can be achieved through the processes. The reasons for choosing DDC are as
follows: 1) it is a universal and widely adopted classification system which covers all disciplines;
2) Its notational system can be useful and effective in differentiating ambiguities in natural
languages; 3) DDC is widely used around the world and has been translated into over 30 languages
(Nicholson, Joseph, & McCulloch, 2009).