Design and Development of a Bilingual Thesaurus for Classical Tamil Studies: Experiences and Issues
A. Neelameghan · 2007
1. Background The Government of India established the Centre of Excellence for Classical Tamil (CECT) about two years ago “with a view to promoting the cause of Classical Tamil”. Currently CECT is hosted by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India (CIIL), where there have already been active programmes and projects for fostering Tamil. A project has been initiated to create a digital library of Tamil classics of the Sangam period • (Sharada and Manju Alka, 2007). Thesauri and similar controlled vocabularies have been part of standard cataloguing practice in libraries and bibliographic databases. There are efforts to apply these tools for indexing digital hypertext resources via metadata resource descriptors. Metadata sets such as Dublin Core include elements for representing the subject of a resource in addition to other data elements. Such standards often recommend that, where possible, the subject element be taken from a relevant thesaurus. In a comparative study of multilingual thesauri InfoDEFT and Esser's EXPO 2000 thesauri - Jorna and Davies (2001) remarked that: …. multilingual tools are getting importance as increasingly diverse groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds seek access to equally diverse pieces of information. In the expanding globalization scenario Conflict arises in the minds of men through misinterpretation and misunderstanding of messages from different cultures, classes of people and linguistic groups (UNESCO) and it is therefore important to device means, methods and tools for improving inter-cultural and inter-faith exchange of ideas.