Abstract
This paper demonstrates the application of conven tional database design techniques to thesaurus representation. The thesaurus is considered as a printed document, as a semantic net, and as a relational database to be used in conjunction with an intelligent information retrieval system Some issues raised by analysis of two standard thesaun in clude the prevalence of compound terms and the representa tion of term structure: thesaurus redundancy and the extent to which it can be eliminated in machine-readable versions: the difficulty of exploiting thesaurus knowledge originally designed for human rather than automatic interpretation: deriving "strength of association" measures between terms in a thesaurus considered as a semantic net, facet representation and the need for variations in the data model to cater for structural differences between thesauri. A complete schema of database tables is presented, with an outline suggestion for using the stored information when matching one or more thesaurus terms with a user's query.
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