Reflections The enterprise thesaurus as a strategic information hub

6. Reflections The enterprise thesaurus as a strategic information hub

Summarizing, in the transition from a problem statement in the business to delivery of an IT-system, the enterprise thesaurus plays a crucial role. It provides definitions and description of usage of terms. A restricted amount of simple, intuitive semantic relations between terms add value. The abstract nature of these relations caters for flexible usage, for instance to indicate class membership, the theme-subtheme relation or the relation between a feature and feature values.

When all the potential benefits of the enterprise thesaurus are realized, the thesaurus starts to function as the organization’s central knowledge hub. To business persons, IT analysts, and stakeholders outside the organization, the

thesaurus acts as a knowledge base where the language of the business is the structuring principle. It is the concepts, the terms used to refer to them and relations between concepts that provide the entry points into and navigation paths through this body of knowledge.

Within this structure, definitions of terms and their explanations are combined with and linked to other concepts, other thesauri, legislation and

compliancy literature, IT design documentation, sources of background information from inside and outside the organization, work instructions, textual templates, and so on: there are no real limitations - at least no technical ones. Thus, the enterprise thesaurus is an important tool for knowledge management.

Still, it is important that governance is well established. The enterprise thesaurus must be normative to be able to fulfil its basic function of being

a reliable source of truth. This means, first and foremost, that the thesaurus should be of a reasonable size. As we have seen, what counts as reasonable will

be different for different organizations and depends on purpose and budget. As a rule, one should strive to find a balance between just large enough to have reasonable coverage, and small enough to keep matters manageable from a governance point of view. The principle of preference is: low cost, high impact.

Once a normative, broadly used and manageable SKOS thesaurus is in place, adding more and more links to it can turn the thesaurus into the

centrepiece of a strategy to gradually adopt Linked Data in the long-term. Seen from this perspective, SKOS offers a low barrier method to introduce Linked Data in the enterprise – one which immediately yields concrete benefits without impacting existing IT assets.

A cautionary note is order, though. A knowledge base defines terms but still leaves open discussion about their application. Suppose someone dies because of an overdose of drugs. Was it murder, suicide or an accident? This is a question of judgment. However, clear definitions will help making the decision transparent.

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What does this mean for lexicography? In an article on the future of dictionaries, the director of Dictionaries of Oxford

University Press Judy Pearsall writes that the dictionary of the future contains

a new type of lexical content, namely, one that is structured and semantically annotated in such a way that it can be read intelligently by a machine, and new products, links and information are automatically produced as a result. It starts with a simple hub, but supports links to additional content to be

added incrementally. 41 New business models need to be developed to keep

lexicographic content creation an economically healthy enterprise. Work by Dirschl et al. (2014) in connection to the open legal thesaurus published by Wolters Kluwer introduced in Section 5 indicates the direction in which this may go.

The technological trends described in this paper with respect to the enterprise thesaurus can easily be projected on general lexicographic practice. However, lexicography in an organizational context focuses on jargon and highly domain specific terms and meanings. Applying the techniques to lexicography in the general domain requires the development of new Linked Data standards that are specific to lexicography, in the same way as SKOS is specific to knowledge management. A step in that direction is the formation of the W3C Ontology-Lexicon Community Group in 2012. 42

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