Terminology Systems

Τhe Centre for Cultural Informatics (CCI) has gained extensive, hands-on, experience in thesaurus management projects and in the development of terminology systems, which dates back to relevant projects undertaken since 1998. The most notable ones include: SIS-TMS, a multi-lingual thesauri management and development system; Aquarelle, an information system managing distributed multimedia information of cultural heritage; Semantic Index System (SIS), a tool for describing and documenting large evolving varieties of highly interrelated data, concepts and complex relationships. These projects have been developed in collaboration with a number of internationally acclaimed organizations, such as the  Getty Research Institute, the English Heritage, the Greek National Centre for Documentation

Since 2015, the CCI has engaged in organizing the activities of the Thesaurus Maintenance Working Group, a DARIAH European Research Infrastructure sanctioned group of scholars. The working group is co-chaired by the CCI and the Academy of Athens.

A list of terminology management information systems that have recently been developed by the CCI can be found below: 

  • BBT (BackBone Thesaurus): an overarching thesaurus (meta-thesaurus) for the humanities.
  • BBTalk (Backbone Thesaurus Management and Connection tool): a communication system that allows BBT users to submit requests for changes regarding the terms and hierarchies of the BBT, supports discussions between the BBT curators regarding the proposed changes and enables local thesauri maintainers to align their vocabularies with the BBT by providing the necessary mechanisms to link their terms to the BBT terms.
  • BBT Federated Thesaurus: a service using the BBT as an overarching thesaurus that connects specialist thesauri and other controlled vocabularies from various domains of the humanities into a federation of thesauri. It was implemented in the context of the project  APOLLONIS).
  • THEMAS  -  THesaurus MAnagement System: an open source Web based system for creating, managing and administering multifaceted, multilingual thesauri according to the principles of ISO 25964-1 and ISO 25964-2 standards. 
  • VisTA  -  Visual Terminology Alignment tool: a tool that provides a simple and friendly web-based user interface for the alignment between two RDF/SKOS-like terminologies, while it visualizes the terminology hierarchies, enables the interactive alignment process, and presents the alignment result.