Geographical Descriptors and the Sources Used in the eJewish.info Multilingual Thesaurus
Dr Uri Miller
eJewish.info The Jewish Agency Initiative for Developing Jewish Networking Infrastructures http://www.ejewish.info urim@jazo.org.il
1. The Purpose of a Thesaurus. A thesaurus is a type of information dictionary based on the totality of terms existing in a natural language. It is a lexical model of objective reality (as a whole or in part). As such it can even be built on a purely conceptual basis, without reference to any specific database. Thesauri are compiled for the purpose of organizing their constituent materials by means of indexing to facilitate searching. Therefore, the thesaurus is an integral combination of the two functions of indexing and searching. It is this integrity that makes it an invaluable research tool. We may picture the indexer and the user as two “football players” playing with the thesaurus as their "ball": while the quality of the "play" depends, of course, on the skill of the players, the "play" as such is impossible without a good "ball".
2. The eJewish Thesaurus The eJewish Thesaurus is unique in its scope, its sources, and its linguistic coverage.
The eJewish Thesaurus is the only thesaurus on the market that covers all topics and issues of concern to Jews, including history, geography, economics, social issues, etc. The eJewish Thesaurus uses Internet materials as its sources, which means that it cannot use "empty" descriptors not linked to related materials. Therefore, our main task is the development of our Thesaurus as a system which would allow us constantly to add new descriptors without distorting conceptual relationships.
Because the eJewish Thesaurus is designed as a multilingual tool, every descriptor listed in English is accompanied by translations in Hebrew, French, Russian and Spanish, including a broad range of variations historically used in each of these languages.
3. Geographical Descriptors. The eJewish Thesaurus uses, among others, geographical descriptors. The role of geography in Jewish history lends a special significance to this subset which may almost be seen as a separate sub-thesaurus. Let us now look at this subset in more detail.
3.1 Sources The eJewish Thesaurus is based on contemporary geographical names. That means we use only the modern official names of geographical objects as descriptors with references "UF"[1] from all possible versions of these names (historical, dialectal, etc.). There are a number of sources on the Web for these versions which we consulted in preparing our Thesaurus: a) for worldwide places – Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names (TGN) http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/tgn/ or Directory of Cities and Towns in The World - Global Gazetteer Version 2.1 (Falling Rain Genomics, Inc.) (http://www.calle.com/world/ or The GEOnet Names Server (GNS) (http://gnswww.nga.mil/geonames/GNS/index.jsp
