Language and culture representativeness in multilingual thesauri development.

Two approaches in developing the semantic structure of the different linguistic versions of a multingual thesaurus are analyzed. In a symmetrically structured thesaurus each language version has a same relational pattern and concepts are assumed to be practically identical across different languages. In a non-symmetrical semantic structure, instead, languages, i.e. cultures, are admitted to differ and semantic structures diverge whenever discrepancies are identified, allowing in this way a better language and culture representativeness.