Reconsidering Nature of Thesaurus and Its Automatic Construction in Information Network

Modern information network such as Digital Library contain much more data than ever before. These data are globally distributed, become accessible to huge, heterogeneous user groups easily. On the other hand, the enormous amount of information requires powerful tools for the user to find the relevant data. One such tool is thesaurus. The thesaurus as an ontology is playing an increasingly important role in knowledge management and the semantic web. The paper reconsiders the nature of thesaurus from the view of ontology. It proposes a system framework of thesaurus construction. And the approach and ideas of thesaurus construction are also described in the paper.