Information Studies

This paper presents an overview and some case studies of interfacing and mutual synergy between Tamil studies on the one hand and knowledge organizing tools on the other. The case studies arose from the ongoing work of designing and developing a Tamil-English bilingual information retrieval thesaurus for the digital library of the Central Institute for Classical Tamil, Chennai, naming practices and the related cultural practices, homonyms and homographs, literary devices and a new semantic relationship category (pseudo-antonym). An analysis of the nature of relationships between concepts in the bilingual thesaurus could be used as the basis for identifying ontological categories. Such studies of interfacing gives scope for comparative studies, knowledge discovery and identification of areas for further research in Tamil studies and in the field of knowledge organizing tools.