[metadataLibrarians] Thesaurus software

[William Denton]

On 19 January 2006, JJ Jacobson wrote:

> I'm about to start shopping for thesaurus-building/taxonomy-wrangling
> software. Does anybody have and recommendations to make, or horror
> stories to relate, abut particular vendors/packages?

I used Term Tree [1] to build a thesaurus with 2,700 terms.  I tried out
five or six others, and it was the best.  The Term Tree people were very 
helpful and would reply overnight (they're on the other side of the world 
to me) with a good answer, and once with a new binary when I reported a 
bug.

It's not perfect.  The program itself has a rather ugly interface and it 
can be slow to page up and down the list of terms.  I couldn't make it 
print an alphabetical display in a small two-column format--it only wanted 
to do it in a big way with lots of whitespace--but I whipped up a Perl 
script to do it for me.  Also, it's a one-person program: if you want two 
people to use it, you need to buy two licenses, and if you use it at the 
same time there could be conflicts.

Nevertheless, it's a reliable program and anyone can learn to use it 
quickly.  We had no trouble with it.  I recommend it.  You can download a 
demo for free, too.

Bill

[1] http://www.termtree.com.au/
-- 
William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org