Developing SKOS-Compliant Multilingual Thesaurus: An ISO 25964 Based Approach

Standards are being used for construction of thesauri from their inceptions. Previously thesauri were designed and maintained manually. But the advancement of ICT gives us the opportunity to execute the same through machine-readable environment. To incorporate thesaurus database electronically, the thesaurus standards also changed accordingly over the time. Concept of data model has emerged for efficient utilization of knowledge organization systems like classification schemes, subject taxonomies and thesauri. New standards are capable to guide in designing and maintaining thesaurus in digital environment and also make them inter-operable among various platforms by using SKOS as domain model and XML as lingua franca. The SKOS-compatible thesaurus standard also supports multilinguality in Unicode based data processing environment. ISO-25964 standards are designed in two parts for constructing and maintaining a SKOS complaint multilingual thesaurus.