Los tesauros y las ontologías en la Biblioteconomía y la Documentación = Thesauruses and ontologies

During the past few years, the information representation and retrieval sector in the area of Documentation and Biblioteconomy has had to assume the important repercussions of the Internet and its associated technologies, and in particular, the World Wide Web (WWW). Technological modifications arising from these important changes are leading to the gradual digitalisation of the information representation and retrieval sector, affecting information artefacts, representation and retrieval tools and user requirements. In the light of this growing context of digitalisation, diverse information representation and retrieval tools exist, which must be studied in addition to diverse fields of knowledge in which these tools have originated: Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Documentation, Linguistic Engineering... Hence, in specialised literature, analyses are performed on information representation and retrieval tools, taxonomies, classification systems, computational lexicons, lexical databases, thesauruses, titles lists, knowledge bases, conceptual maps, ontologies, synonym rings and semantic networks, among others. Among this wide spectrum of information representation and retrieval tools are thesauruses and ontologies, which are most often linked in bibliography, even though they come from completely different disciplinary areas. However, the conceptualisation applied by authors to the terms "thesaurus" and "ontology" is quite diverse, and sometimes authors confuse, oppose, complement or overlap both these concepts. The overall objective of the present article [1] is to establish the relationship between the concepts of thesaurus and ontology in the Documentation and Biblioteconomy field. Two specific objectives have been established for this purpose. Firstly, to make an analysis of the thesaurus-based concept with a view to defining its most important characteristics and to verify the similarities and differences it shares with ontologies. And secondly, to establish a definition for the ontology concept, also for the purpose of verifying its characteristics and analysing the similarities and differences it has with thesauruses