Interactive thesaurus construction methods in the ecological domain

Researchers having to deal with enormous amounts of information gleaned from international data banks are familiar with the benefits of a specialized, well-constructed thesaurus for information retrieval. In the ecology field considerable amounts of specialized, interdisciplinary information can be obtained from international data banks that are continuously updated. We describe here the construction of an interactive thesaurus for information retrieval in a subdomain of the ecology, specifically the ecology of the Venice Lagoon. The thesaurus was constructed using a multilingual bibliography (Italian, French and English texts). Two approaches to information retrieval are used: 1) examination of text by grammatical analysis, leading to the extraction of significant phrases; and 2) semantic clustering of these phrases using the word root. The design is described by applying it to a subset of an example bibliography.