Terminology Maintenance for Corporate Information Retrieval

The goal of information retrieval in the corporate environment is to provide management, sales, marketing, and product development with timely information about the changes in external forces that impact strategic and tactical business decisions including what products to build and how to position these products in the marketplace. The elements of this type of information change rapidly. Mergers and acquisitions change the structure of the marketplace, the vendors and their products; political and economic changes impact production and market decisions from manufacturing plant locations to the location of distribution facilities. Thus, corporate IR is a complex, volatile application which requires tools and processes to allow dynamic modification to content. This paper will discuss how Thesaurus/Indexing Management System (TIMS) is used at Digital Equipment Corporation to allow for modification of the information retrieval application without modifying or reloading the underlying content. Part of the solution lies in the capabilities of using faceted thesaurus structures, that can serve as an abstracted model of the user's need and the content. Consistent information retrieval, and its benefit of ongoing funding and support, depends on the continual application of maintenance processes as part of the overall management of a corporate information retrieval program. This paper will present the following topics related to thesaurus maintenance: capturing and structuring of unknown terms, implementation and training, and evaluation