The Backbone Thesaurus (BBT for short) is the flagship outcome of the work undertaken by a multidisciplinary team of experts in the context of the Thesaurus Maintenance Working Group. It is a faceted classification scheme that enables intersubjective and interdisciplinary classification development and integration. It aims at allowing access, compatibility and comparison across heterogeneous classification systems and enhances collaboration across the various humanities fields without forcing researchers to abandon their own terminology.
To support the system, we have developed a set of tools (http://www.backbonethesaurus.eu/bbt-tools), namely BBT-Browser, customized and maintained by ACDH-OEAW, and BBTalk, developed and maintained by FORTH-ICS. BBTalk is a thesaurus submission and connection management tool enabling specialist thesaurus maintainers to align their thesauri or controlled vocabularies with a meta-thesaurus, the BBT, in a manner that supports a check of the semantic soundness of the classification and enables the re-use of their resources by a broader audience. Furthermore, BBTalk serves as a communication system that supports discussions between the curators of BBT and its end users, regarding changes that they wish to see implemented on the core structure of BBT.
BBT is an ongoing work and we are currently in the process of reviewing the material we have at our disposal in order to identify additional facets and hierarchies. Further information on BBT can be found at http://www.backbonethesaurus.eu/.
We hereby invite thesauri maintainers to use BBTalk in order to test their material for compliance with BBT, as well as to help us identify issues relating to facets and hierarchies that need revisiting and to propose changes to its structure.
This post is provided by Helen Goulis and Eleni Tsoulouha, co-chairs of the DARIAH-EU Working Group Thesaurus Maintenance
