Taxonomy: the role and relations of standardised languages. Towards the semantic web

Abstract

The contradiction between the theoretically unlimited access to information and the efficiency of information searching has been pressing researchers and IT professionals to enhance the collaboration of computers and human workforce in the processes of information and knowledge acquisition. The importance attached to information retrieval methods has expanded beyond the library environment, resulting in the increasing respect of the professional background of traditional information retrieval languages and in the utilization of their theoretical principles even by business organisations. Having set the objective of the quick and comprehensive searching of portal and webpage contents, the professionals engaged in the development of the so-called semantic or intelligent web are working towards the creation of a web-based open and distributed system, that aims to apply standard descriptive languages to the online information sources, and will reach its full potential when the automatic distribution of data becomes possible. New programs and methods are being developed with the collaboration of software engineers, and the milestones of the progress are reported on by W3C working groups. The coordinated and computer-based de­velopment of various traditional and automatic cata­loguing languages demonstrates remarkable achievements, however, automatic solutions are only provided by a few softwares. As far as computer-based classification tools are concerned, a group of experts in the theoretical issues of information sciences regard taxonomies and related tools as an easily adoptable classification system (a controlled vocabulary with a low level of hierarchy) that can be generated relatively quickly. Thus this paper primarily concentrates on taxonomy.