Language and culture representativeness in multilingual thesauri development

Multilingual thesauri have the potential to play a key role in a worldwide information exchange process enabling information indexing and retrieval. A key issue identified in their building procedures is the management of the semantics of the terms and of the relationships through the different languages of the multilingual thesaurus. Two possible approaches in developing the semantic structure of the different linguistic versions have been analyzed in the light of selected examples/case studies, acknowledging pros and cons. 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.