Role of Thesauri in the Information Management in the Web-Based Services and Systems

Information sharing, exchanging and archiving is the backbone of any organized activity, regardless if it is performed in the sphere of business, home or administration. Semantic Web technologies allow controlling the growth and structure of information, and provide search and inference methods. The article touches one of the main problems in the information-based societies. It refers to the problem of information management and sharing in the heterogonous, complex systems, exposing their functions through the web services.

The main axis of the paper is the implementation of remotely accessible knowledge bases in form of thesauri - dynamic, centrally coordinated dictionaries. Thesauri may contain terms and concepts with an indication of their semantic relationships. They can serve as sources of concept definitions used by various registries, may provide additional information to the search engines, and may support multilingual representation. The article provides some examples of such use cases, targeting special concerns on applications of thesauri in the geospatial domain. The aim of this article was also to show practical aspects of thesauri implementation. The article shows the way of applying officially published standards as guidelines in building interoperable thesauri in form of web service. The implementation of such service, involving the use of SKOS specification as a core information model of the thesauri, and SOAP and REST technologies as a base for communication implementation, is presented. The backend of the service is built on SESAME repository supporting SeRQL and RQL query languages. The examples of implemented clients of the service are: Internet enabled desktop application and web control that can be inserted into any web page.