Thesaurus UB (THUB) - Frequently Asked Questions

 

What standards is it based on?

For the development of the THUB, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards are followed:

  • ISO 2788 Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri
  • ISO 5964 Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri

In 2008, these two standards were revised, expanded, and consolidated into a new standard, ISO 25964 Thesauri and Interoperability with other Vocabularies.

 

Who develops the Thesaurus UB?

The THUB is managed and developed by the Unitat Tècnica d'Indexació de Procés Tècnic of the CRAI of the University of Barcelona, in collaboration with catalogers from the CRAI of the UB.

 

When is it updated?

The management of the THUB is integrated into the UB's library management system, and as such, all modifications and new terms are immediately incorporated and searchable in Cercabib (UB CRAI's discovery tool). The update of the THUB database is done weekly.

 

What is its thematic scope?

THUB is a multidisciplinary thesaurus that includes terms that represent concepts from various specialties within the field of interest of the University of Barcelona. There are three major knowledge areas on which THUB is based: Science and Technology, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Arts and Letters. The UB Thesaurus contains terminology related to Fine Arts, Library Science and Documentation, Biology, Earth Sciences, Economics and Business, Labor Relations, Agri-food Science and Technology, Social Sciences (demography, sociology, statistics, politics), Knowledge and Culture, Law, Education and Pedagogy, Engineering and Technology, Performing Arts, Games and Sports, Ethnology, Pharmacy, Philology, Philosophy, Physics, Geography, History, Industry, Commerce, and Communications, Computer Science, Mathematics, Environment, Medicine, Nursing, and Dentistry, Psychology, Chemistry, Religion, Social Work, and Social Services, Geographic Names, and Genre and Form Terms.

 

What are the Microthesauri UB?

To facilitate the search for information resources in each of these areas, THUB has been subdivided into categories that on their own or in combination with others form the Microthesauri UB. Each microthesaurus contains terminology related to its semantic field, arranged alphabetically. Currently, the Thesaurus UB includes 29 thematic microthesauri and one for Geographic Names. All the Microthesaurus UB provide a link to Cercabib (UB CRAI's discovery tool) to facilitate the retrieval of information resources indexed under these concepts.

 

What license is applied to the use of the Thesaurus UB?

The license applied to THUB is CC0 1.0 (Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication), which is a completely open license aimed at promoting its reuse in accordance with our institution's policy of promoting open data and its exchange.

 

What does "publishing Linked Open Data" mean?

When we talk about Linked Open Data (LOD), we refer to a method of publishing structured data that can interconnect and be reused by anyone. The LOD project is related to the Semantic Web, which aims to expand the web with a more useful common database. The system is based on standard web technologies that can be read by computers (HTTP, RDF, URI). If databases are published in RDF, RDF links can be established between data from different sources, allowing them to be interconnected, queried, and reused. Publishing in Linked Open Data contributes to the transformation of the web from a web of documents to a web of data. The publication of the Thesaurus UB as LOD has been done with the participation of the company Nubilum and its Coeli software.