Page 106 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

WU Wenna & BAO Xiulin / The architecture and data model of the National Thesauri Warehouse 105

Committee in Sciences and Technologies, terms from terminology standards, etc. During the
development of NTW, except the concepts of thesauri, other terms from basic lexicon are
gradually inducted into thesaurus concept schemes, such as high frequency terms, standardized
terms, new terms, and so on. Further establish links between concepts and terms. This may
effectively improve the application performance of thesauri, and then improve information
organization and application.

2.3 Service and application

In the web environment, knowledge organization systems have the following application
directions (Xue, 2009): 1) the systems can be used as framework and concept set in information
organization; 2) the systems can be used to support information processing with structured
conceptual hierarchies and semantic relations providing functions of automatic indexing, automatic
classifying, information extracting, automatic abstracting, automatic referencing, etc.; 3) the
systems can be used as a post-control for intelligent information retrieval; 4) the systems can be
used as tools for knowledge mining, knowledge discovery, and discipline development analysis
and forecasting.
It can be perceived that thesaurus can be utilized widely. However, in China, thesaurus
development still remains at explorative and R&D stages and has not been practically
implemented. Mature tools and products are scarce. In fact, not many information systems have
usable thesauri to control their terms, and have utilized abundant semantic information in thesauri.
One of the main reasons is that acquiring and utilizing thesauri is difficult. Thus, the most urgent
problem needing to be resolved first is to provide data support for applications based on thesauri.
Fan Wei (2012) presented a terminology service framework, which consists of three levels. The
first level provides thesaurus metadata, utilization statistics and so on. The second level aims to
reveal conceptual semantic information cross thesauri and to provide retrieval service based on
terms. The third level provides services to the third party application by supplying concepts, terms
and semantic information in a formal and structured form based on above two levels. Fan Wei’s
idea about the progressive service is accepted by NTW. Content- construction results of various
semantic levels would be used to provide data services, such as thesaurus metadata service, concept
service, concept group service, and thesaurus customization service, which may be performed
through user (person) search, browse, edit, download, and the third party request. Knowledge units
provided in services have different granularities according to the demands on specific thesaurus
application and construction.

2.3.1 Thesaurus metadata service
Thesaurus metadata service includes searching, browsing and downloading thesaurus registration