Marcia Lei Zeng and Yu Chen
Kent State University
Aimed at providing a gateway for searching distributed databases of alternative medicine produced in various countries, we developed this important component for the project. The thesaurus management system performs at two levels, both with a Web interface. First, there is a search site open to anyone who wants to do cross-thesauri searching or browsing. Second, there is a thesaurus maintenance site only accessible by the project team members. (NKOS members can upload and test their thesauri at: http://circe.slis.kent.edu/mzeng/macmed/thesaurihome.html). At the moment, an alphabetical display, index of all terms, hierarchical display, and rotated display are the options for uploading, downloading, printing, and browsing. Once a hierarchical list or an alphabetical thesaurus is uploaded, other lists/displays can be generated automatically. An editing template is provided for entry-by-entry editing. Cross-thesauri searching for particular terms is performed based on exact and partial matching. Search terms are directly linked to the entries in a thesaurus. Our next step is to implement database searching.