The CLARIN Thesaurus Constructing a Knowledge Organization System for Indexing Content in Social Sciences and Humanities Research Infrastructures

The present dissertation is the result of a project in collaboration with CLARIN, the research infrastructure for language as social and cultural data, which revolved around the creation of a thesaurus related to the infrastructure and the services and tools it provides. The overarching objective of the project is to develop a versatile multilingual resource that standardises specialised vocabulary and systematically organises domain knowledge within CLARIN. The primary application of the thesaurus is topic annotation on the CLARIN website to improve content retrieval. However, it also aims to serve other purposes, such as providing definitions for services and tools and acting as a term base for translating and localising the CLARIN ERIC website into other languages. The initial version of the CLARIN Thesaurus was developed as an internship project at CLARIN ERIC, and resulted in a bilingual English-Italian flat resource consisting of 152 concepts, which were categorised into three identified subdomains. Starting from these three groups, this work seeks to expand and organise the concepts into a structured thesaurus, enhancing its applicability within CLARIN. The dissertation is structured into four chapters. Chapter 1. provides an overview of CLARIN and details the project objectives. Chapter 2. covers the theoretical background, outlining the principles of terminology, and the role of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs). Chapter 3. focuses on the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), the chosen representation format for the thesaurus, and provides examples of relevant SKOS resources. Chapter 4. details the development of the CLARIN Thesaurus, including the creation process of the first version, and the subsequent hierarchical organisation of concepts, along with the challenges encountered.