Folks Thesauri or Search Thesauri: Why Semantic Search Engines Need Folks Thesauri?

The term ‘folks thesaurus’ was coined as a combination of ‘folks’ and ‘thesaurus’. Afolks thesaurus puts terms into context by defining a variety of semantic relationshipsamong the thesaurus terms. The objective of this study is to propose and present aconceptual basis from which it will be possible to build a folks thesaurus. The folksthesaurus takes its terminology and usage from a variety of sources (e.g., users searchqueries, traditional thesauri, Wikipedia categories, folksonomies, social tagging,hashtags, and log file analysis of search engines). Folks thesaurus describing subjectcontent can play a vital role in supporting web indexing and information retrieval. Folksthesauri are useful in bridging the gap that exists between the concepts presented byauthors and the conceptual terms presented by a user/searcher. Folks thesaurus limits theterms available and increases the possibility that the query will use appropriate terms. Ifthe folks thesaurus has structure in the form of associative or hierarchical tree structureand semantic relationships such as broader terms (BT), narrower terms (NT) or relatedterms (RT), these may also help the user in navigation through hierarchical semanticrelationships and finding an appropriate query expression. If a query is too inclusive, thennarrower terms may be substituted to refine the query. On the other hand, a queryreturning too few results can be broadened through the substitution of broader terms.Related terms may also be an aid in navigation and query construction.