1. Thesaurus speed dating conclusions

2. The ideal thesaurus… …is tailor-made for the special needs of its user community. In other words, it is different from every other thesaurus. Making it different helps with: adapting the tool to its intended application popularity with users the bottom line (financially) Note the tension between conforming to an ideal norm, and differentiation to suit users

3. But the user community is changing Google-eyed Heightened expectations Amorphous, expanding, scattered, global, interconnected, unpredictable Thesauri partnered with ontologies have the power to unlock barriers and drive new inferencing applications. Potentially, the Semantic Web is the user community, for any online thesaurus ported using SKOS.

4. An effective Semantic Web poses demands on thesauri: Rigorous hierarchies Reliable mappings Forethought about moving thesaurus extracts to other contexts What else? Lets reconsider the ideal thesaurus…

5. Specificity Thesaurus responds to its context – the application(s); political environment; organizational; financial. But should put the interests of its users above those of its producers Budgets are shrinking. Cooperation between thesaurus producers?

6. Ease of use Looks like Google? Involves the users. Puts the user first. The ideal thesaurus is invisible to users And the name thesaurus is not used in public Integrated with browsing, searching and indexing Search expansion based on relationships between terms and concepts

7. Updating Maintaining access to obsolescent terms/concepts? Relationships as well as terms updated Frequent updating creates problems as well as benefits. Interim updates? The whole maintenance job is too time- consuming Problems arise when software is changed/abandoned

8. Multilinguism Ability to cope with diverse languages and scripts Very demanding. Needs experts in the language/ and in the domain and context of use/ and in the idea of a thesaurus Copes with cultural as well as linguistic differences, leading to non-symmetrical structures

9. Interoperability/Semantic Web Copyright permissions/licences Use compatible software Linkage with terminology work Cooperation, leading to fewer different thesauri and fewer different information repositories Need an architecture for integrating specialized vocabularies under a generalized umbrella Publish in SKOS for Linked Data applications Vision of a worldwide semantic pool, with everything interlinked Inter-vocabulary mapping essential. But its not easy!

10. The ideal thesaurus… Is sustainable – financially and politically …is the realization of where your thoughts take you, having participated in the discussions today. Make the most of it!