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Superthes
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In the last years, a GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) in all the languages of the EU-member states has been developed within the working program of the "European Topic Centre for Catalogue of Data Sources & Thesaurus" (ETC/CDS), European Environment Agency, (EEA). GEMET is meant to support indexing of metadata within the CDS system. |
The Thesaurus of Environmental Data Catalogue Austria and Germany UDKT has been managed since 1995 by the software package THESmain. As, within almost a decade, the software came into age, a successor was designed, using a 4th generation programming language, a more powerful database engine and, hopefully, a more modern and more easily understandable user interface. Of course a multitude of new functions were implemented, most of them coming from requirements of previously working with THESmain.
The new software SuperThes is currently in use by the environmental agency in Berlin and Vienna and by CNR in Rome. Recently some institutions have adopted SuperThes as platform for their thesaurus work e.g. "Bundesanstalt für Wasserbau", Hamburg /NOKIS or WHO/CEHA in Amman, Jordan. |
AdaptabilityTypically thesaurus software packages are constructed for a particular application where a single institution pays money for the development. If the packages performance is sufficient, the software is sold to other firms and institutions if it is possible to squeeze their requirements into the existing software. In many cases this is just partially successful –THESmain is such an example. In this aspect SuperThes is very different. After installation there are no predefined tables or fields. There is also no predefined hierarchy. |
 Table and Field Editor |
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A thesaurus developer is able to define tables and fields according to his requirements. There is no limitation in the number of tables. Fields are limited to 64 kBytes per line. Thus using Memo fields 16384 fields may be defined per table. The internal data storage is Unicode compliant enabling the use of every written language as long operating system support is existing. Currently about 200 languages are defined in SuperThes. |
FlexibilityTraditional thesaurus software packages contain few data types only. Typically there are data types for numbers, for text and memo fields for larger chunks of text. It is not even possible to write simple chemical formulas like H2O. If data is found in electronic sources like Microsoft Word documents or in web pages, the text is likely to be not in ASCII any more. So thesaurus workers have to convert the RTF or UTF8 encoded data into their legacy ASCII systems.
SuperThes contains many powerful data types beside the standard field types like “Text” or “Memo”. So fields may contain images, sounds or formatted documents in Rich Text format (RTF) allowing to incorporate documents created in Microsoft Word or in StarOffice. For the ease of operation drop down selectors are also implemented. |
 Document and Image Editors |
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Almost all document and image data are kept within data processing equipment. Imagine finding a definition from an online encyclopaedia including an image fitting a term in your data collection. Traditional software requires you to write the definition and to forget about the image. SuperThes enables you to include document and image either per cut and paste or by simple dragging the data into the appropriate fields. Of course this features are bi-directional enabling drag and drop operation from SuperThes into Microsoft Word, Excel etc. |
InteroperabilityAnother important item is bulk data exchange. SuperThes supports two different methods for data exchange of bulk data:
XML data exchange SuperThes produces XML output from its tabular and structural data and of course it is possible to import from XML sources. The XML format is contained in a Document type definition which of course is published and available to everyone.
The document type definition is in fact a metadefinition describing a method to describe a thesaurus’ actual configuration. An SuperThes XML file consists of three parts:
Over all of the advantages of XML data exchange there is one big disadvantage: the “other” program has to have a XML parser. Well you might use some public available tool kit like SAX. But the data path from XML into your database engine must be programmed. So there is most likely a high initial cost to implement XML data exchange.
If it comes to actions like to get data from an old system into SuperThes most people prefer to use a simple text format.
XML data may contain images, documents and sounds. This type of data are encoded as Base64 which is adapted from RFC1421. This type of encoding is compliant to RFC2045 (Internet Message Bodies)
Textual data exchange Data which is contained in tables is very frequently found as a candidate to import into a thesaurus. Such data collections coming typically from text processing software like MS-Word or from a spreadsheet program like MS-Excel may be very easily imported into SuperThes. Various types of character encoding, date and time formats, field and record separator may be selected. Text may be encoded in every code page available on Microsoft operating systems and of course in Unicode. Unicode is supported either in UCS-16 or in UTF-8.
Imported data may be appended to an existing table. Columns may be referenced to already existing data and data may be merged with existing data.
Data to export are defined by selecting a table and fields.
Textual data exchange may also contain image or document data which are encoded as Base64 (See XML data exchange for details). |
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