GenThes: A General Thesaurus Browser for Web-based Catalogue Systems - A Step towards Component based Catalogue Systems

Thesauri have been proven means to identify documents in libraries for centuries. In this paper, we show how this approach can be combined with most recent Internet technologies. The Java-based general thesaurus browser GenThes is able to handle several heterogeneous, multilingual thesauri. With the General European Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET), GenThes is currently being used with several environmental catalogue systems. Feedback from users reveal that this approach greatly facilitates search and retrieval as compared to free-text only search. Performance which is crucial in Web applications as well has been improved by reducing the transfer volume of data and code. The software architecture of GenThes supports easy configuration and adaption to the individual needs of different systems that it is connected to. Ongoing work as well addresses to use GenThes as a query expansion module for multilingual search in distributed document collections.