Page 117 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

116 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 8, 2016

shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Metadata scheme for term description
Elements Specifications
Term ID dc:Identifier URI
Resource Type rdf:type skosxl:lable
Term Form skosxl:literalForm One and only one
Phonetic Notation phoneticNotation Chinese Pinyin of term
Correct Spelling misSpellOf
Misspelling misSpell
Term ID. Non-semantic relations
Relation Full Name skosxl:labelRelation abbreviationOf between terms
Abbreviation abbreviation
Translation translation

6 Conclusions

Thesaurus knowledge systems are not only used in document subject indexing and intelligent
retrieval, but also used as semantic tools for knowledge mining and knowledge services. There are
a large number of thesaurus resources exist in China. NTW is a thesaurus integration system and
aims to make these thesauri easily to be found and utilized.
Most Chinese thesauri have been constructed following national standards. They, therefore, share
similar structure and description patterns. However, some thesauri have different features because
of specific demands on describing knowledge systems from different disciplines. Thesaurus
metadata must be extended to meet the need of describing all thesauri completely. However, too
much metadata self-defining is disadvantageous on data understanding and data exchange. Thus,
NTW’s knowledge description needs to balance generality and specialty, ensures universality of
metadata as well as retains the integrality of original information.
Semantic integration of numerous thesauri is a huge project. Thus far, some previous enormous
thesaurus integration projects have succeeded. But till today, the integration results have not been
utilized satisfactorily. Therefore, NTW should adopt a progressive construction method and utilizes
different construction results in different stages to provide services of various semantic levels.
First, it stores and describes thesaurus data uniformly to make thesaurus findable, acquirable
and useable. On this basis, and according to specific application demands, such as thesaurus
customization service, it then accomplishes semantic integration of thesaurus concepts gradually.
Furthermore, NTW essentially is a project about resource sharing. In China, there are more than
100 Chinese thesauri, which are in fact developed and controlled by different organizations. Some
do not really have clear definition of copyrights, whilst some are inappropriately and insufficiently
maintained. So more practical and theoretical experiences need to be gained and shared about