Web Thesaurus Compendium

- thesauri alphabetical (you are here)
- thesauri indexed by subject
- thesaurus-related literature and resources
- thesaurus-related research groups
- thesaurus-building tools and software
 
 

Thesauri and classifications sorted alphabetically according to proper name

The following list contains all the thesauri and other indexing languages of the Web Thesaurus Compendium sorted alphabetically according to their official names. If a standard acronym is used in the title, that was the basis for alphabetization (e.g. OECD Macrothesaurus).
 
 
AMS Mathematics Subject Classification
Hierarchical browsing only in this classification produced by the American Mathematical Society, which includes hyperlinks to "see also" relations. Stockholm University has a searchable (by keyword or code) version, for which one apparently needs a password, though. English.
Archaeological Objects Thesaurus
A hierarchical and alphabetical thesaurus of archaeological object types. In English.
Art & Architecture Thesaurus Browser
Search or browse hierarchically in this facetted thesaurus produced by the Getty Information Institute. It's also possible to limit searches to terms or scope notes.
Asia - Vegetable Thesaurus
A hierarchically browsable thesaurus for Asian vegetables. With pictures and translations in other languages, but no search function. English.
Astronomy Thesaurus
In English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, this thesaurus offers alphabetical browsing and term search, including booleans. Clicking on a term found will give you related terms and translations. A neat thesaurus! Also lots of help and info.
BZZURKK - The Thesaurus of Champions
This off-the-wall thesaurus is a collection of written comic book sounds (e.g. AARGH, HMMMMPH) categorized according to type of sound (from alarm sounds to whirring sounds), with cross-references and an alphabetical index which includes sources (e.g. EEEEHAUGHHH [Venom: The Enemy Within vol.1 #1, 1994] The sound of a sonic blast). ZOWIE!
CATIE Thesaurus This thesaurus is actually an alphabetical KWOC (Keyword Out of Context) index listing fragments of all keywords and keyword phrases used by the Canadian "Community AIDS Treatment Information Exchange" to index their resources. Each partial term is linked to the actual keyword, but there is no further linking or interrelating of terms. In English and French. Slow, and the structure of the site is hard to understand.
CERES Thematic Thesaurus
CERES stands for California Environmental Resources Evaluation System. Their thesaurus offers hierarchical and alphabetical browsing, and related topics, once you've chosen a term. (English)
CALL Dictionary and Thesaurus
The CALL (Center for Army Lessons Learned) thesaurus, maintained by the US Government, contains military terminology, codes, names, etc. In English. This thesaurus can be searched per search term and is also alphabetically browsable. CALL includes such diverse terms as "packet switching" (with definition and BT), "Pacific Fleet" and "William J. Perry". Other sources of military terminology are linked.
Chemical Abstracts General Subject Vocabulary Helper The 14th version of the CAS Collective Index Vocabulary is available here for browsing alphabetically and hierarchically. Cross-reference indexes from the old to new version and vice versa also here. Once found, terms include hyperlinked hierarchical relations, other related terms, UF, USE, and old terms. English.
Cook's Thesaurus An unusual topic for a thesaurus, "Cook's" also has unusual domain-specific relations: e.g. substitutes, equivalents, shopping hints, lots of other info and tips. Term searching and category browsing available; found entries are hyperlinked. A nice reference.
Dewey Decimal Classification Home page of the DDC maintained by OCLC. From here you can browse summaries of the 21st version of the DDC, find information on available translations and other links. Summary one is the main ten classes, summary two the top two classes, summary three the top three levels. No further classes or linking.
Dewey Decimal Classification - WWlib Browse Interface Beginning with the top ten classes you can browse downwards in this implementation. Beyond that no hyperlinking, no search. Classes are also linked to library holdings at the U. of Wolverhampton.
Dr. Antonius Gesundheits-Server
Thesaurus-based search engine for medical terms. Lists only German websites.
DTIC Thesaurus
Search-only thesaurus of military terminology used to index the databases of the Defense Technical Information Center. Has some definitions, hierarchical relations, and USE; only rudimentary hyperlinking. English.
ERIC Thesaurus
Thesaurus of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) in the US (English only); contains all standard thesaurus relations; initial entry is by search only. A very nice implementation - the results of thesaurus searching are fully hyperlinked in one frame; in an adjacent frame they can be transferred into a search query with which the ERIC bibliographic databases can then be searched.
EURODICAUTOM The official site for the EU terminology databank with terms, translations, definitions and other term attributes in most EU languages. Another version is here. The EU also maintains a website with lots of other multilingual dictionary and term bank resources on the web.
Fachgebärdenlexikon Psychologie German thesaurus which contains over 900 terms in sign-language in the area of psychology. Index in English as well.
Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Utopia Thesaurus
How's that for a specialized subject thesaurus? As of yet this is simply an alphabetical list and a hierarchical subject tree with no interlinking.
Feministische phantastisch-utopische Literatur
This German site is similar in subject matter to the thesaurus above, with lots of information on literature. The actual keyword list is pretty small and not really a thesaurus but linked to books, authors and their descriptions and bios.
Gender Inn Thesaurus
The University of Cologne maintains a thesaurus to facilitate access to their Women's and Gender Studies Database. Available in both German and English, this is really a classified set of subject headings, in which only the top three levels (e.g. "Literary Reception", "Textual Features"  are linked to their subterms (e.g. "mother-son relationship").
Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) Thesaurus
Another Library of Congress thesaurus, this one contains well-structured and hyperlinked terms interrelated by the standard thesaurus relations, allows browsing and searching. The GLIN thesaurus also includes a search function "sounds like", based on the Soundex representation of all terms in the thesaurus. Is used to index worldwide legislation. After finding search terms in the thesaurus they can be used to search the GLIN databases.
Gnomon Thesauri This facetted set of German thesauri is used to access the Gnomon bibliographic database on classical studies. One can browse the facets or search directly for terms. Found terms are linked to all the relevant literature in the database. Each document includes index terms from the thesaurus which are also hyperlinked. It is also possible to download both an alphabetical and a systematic version of the entire thesaurus.
Grants Keyword Thesaurus
Sorry, this is an exception to the rule here, as this thesaurus is available for downloading, but is not online in hypertext. Still, due to the subject matter, it may be of interest. The thesaurus (English) was developed in cooperation with the NSF and other organisations which provide research grants as a descriptive vocabulary of all fields of research.
HASSET: Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus
This English thesaurus is based on a UNESCO thesaurus and was developed by the University of Essex. Initial entry is by search term, from there hierarchical as well as other types of browsing are possible. Searches in the university's ESRC archives can also be launched directly after finding appropriate search terms via the thesaurus.
Health Promotion Thesaurus The International Union for Health Promotion and Education maintains this four language thesaurus (English, French, German, Dutch), which can be browsed alphabetically. Found terms are hyperlinked using standard thesaurus relations.
Historical Thesaurus of English Under development at the English Dept. of the U. of Glasgow, this ambitious project plans to include the vocabulary of English from the earliest written records to the present. Main source is the Oxford English Dictionary. The data are arranged semantically and chronologically. There are three main SECTIONS: (I) The External World, (II)The Mind, (III) Society. The first two levels can be viewed here as can three more complete sample headings.
ICONCLASS Iconographic classification system  developed in the Netherlands for works of art containing 24,000 definitions of objects, persons, events, situations and abstract ideas, and 13,000 keywords for describing visual documents, main focus but not exclusively on classical and biblical themes. Uses alphanumeric notation, is browsable in many ways and searchable, also java browser available. English. Very impressive.
INGRID Library Thesaurus Thesaurus of the Estonian Tartu University Library. In English and Estonian, allows direct term search which results in terms with hyperlinked broader and narrower terms.
ITS Thesaurus The ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) Thesaurus is based on the TRT (Transportation Research Thesaurus), and is intended for subject accessing the PATH bibliographic database on intelligent trasportation. Has the standard thesaurus relations, but the web version has no hyperlinking; instead, an alphabetical list, and a hierarchical list including related terms under each notation. 350 terms; English.
Library of Congress Classification (LCC) One of the world's major general classification systems (along with Dewey and UDC). This implementation offers the top classes, each with a link to its subclasses, but no further hyperlinking, no search.
LC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials I (TGM I)
Created by the Library of Congress for the indexing and cataloguing of images. In English with very informative Front Matter. Includes the standard thesaurus relations. This is Part I of the thesaurus, covering the subject matter of graphic materials. Part II see below.
LC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials II (TGM II)
Companion to TGM I above, this part is devoted more to the genres and physical characteristics of graphic materials rather than to the portrayed subject matter. As does the TGM I, it allows searching and browsing and is well-linked.
Legislative Indexing Vocabulary (LIV)
Library of Congress (US) indexing terms used by the Congressional Research Service to index all bills introduced in congress. Allows searching, and browsing from various alphabetical entry points, has linked BT, NT, RT, USE. English only. The Library of Congress also maintains a Thesauri Home Page of its own thesauri.
Lexical FreeNet
This fascinating tool lets you enter any two words as source and target concepts and then compute the relations between them, e.g. the shortest conceptual path between the two terms "food" and "drought" is calculated as FOOD->EAT->CROP->DROUGHT. Other options for relations also available. Utilizes both the semantic relations in WordNet and statistical analyses of large corpora. From Carnegie Mellon University, as is the Rhyming Dictionary (see below).
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
The U.S. National Library of Medicine developed this (English) set of hierarchical trees of terms covering all medical disciplines. They can be downloaded or browsed online; however, in the online version there is no hypertext interlinking beyond a choice of tree to be browsed, and no relations other than the implicit BT-NT indicated by indentation in the trees. There are over 18,000 terms, and MeSH is used to index MEDLINE, MEDLARS, and other databases.
Merriam Webster Thesaurus
Simple search box for finding synonyms from Merriam Webster. Delivers precise and detailed search results, directly linked to the Merriam Webster Dictionary.
Multilingual Egyptological Thesaurus This E/F/G facetted thesaurus (Arabic, Spanish, Italian planned) is a collaborative effort of several international Egyptological societies. Maintained at the U. of Utrecht, it is intended to facilitate information exchange above all on museum objects. Fifteen facets (e.g. provenance, language, description, material) contain numerically notated hierarchical terms. Browsable; searching planned.
NAICS - North American Industry Classification
Mexico, Canada and the U.S. collaborated to develop this hierarchical classification of types of industry. Codes can be viewed online, but are not hyperlinked - they are in a long hierachical list. Top categories include "11 Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, Hunting", "52 Finance and Insurance" etc., down to 4 levels of subcategories, e.g. "522294 Secondary Market Financing". Developed for purposes of maintaining comparable statistics. Can also be downloaded in various ways.
NASA Thesaurus
Electronic version of the NASA (U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Association) thesaurus (in English). After initial entry through alphabetical browsing, terms can be displayed with their hierarchically and otherwise related terms (use/used for not yet implemented).
OECD Macrothesaurus
A three-language (English/Spanish/French) thesaurus in the areas of social and economic sciences (German soon to come), emphasis on development issues, with over 4000 descriptors and the standard thesaurus relations. Browsable alphabetically or by broad chapter heading, searchable, also allows construction and translation of query terms in a special window.
Optics Classification and Indexing Scheme (OCIS) The Optical Society of America' OCIS has a two-level hierarchical structure with 36 main categories and 700 sub-categories. Hyperlinking from main to sub-categories.
Phrase Finder Input a word and the Phrase Finder will return a list of phrases that are related to your word in some way. Most phrases with meanings and origin.
Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus
This visualized thesaurus accesses WordNet to display a given word graphically connected to related words. Clicking on any of the displayed words moves it to the center and shows its related terms. There are graphical means of adjusting various parameters, e.g. what types of related terms one wants to see. A very interesting application, couldn't always get everything to work, though. Slow.
PTO Patent Classification
The US Patent and Trademark Office maintains a patent classification which can be hierarchically browsed and alphabetically browsed and searched on this site maintained at the U. of North Carolina. After finding patent classes you can then search for patents in the class as well.
Roget's Thesaurus
Searchable, alphabetically and class-based browsable version of Roget's. For example, you can browse in Class V: "Words Relating to the Voluntary Powers; Individual and Intersocial Volition". Sometimes slow, but nice.
Roget's Thesaurus
Another of several versions of the classic English synonym reference on the net, here a searchable Gopher index.
SCOP - Structural Classification of Proteins
Hierarchical browsing, keyword search, sequence similarity search and access to a database are available through this very specialized classification. The relations used are, in addition to hierarchy, also specific to the domain: "class", "fold", "family", "superfamily", "protein domain". Hyperlinked.
Seattle City Clerk Thesaurus
This classification cum thesaurus contains 1331 descriptors and 254 non-descriptors, interrelated (and graphically interlinked) by all the standard relations. Covers terminology needed to index documents dealing with city government activities. English only. Can be searched and browsed by broad subject category. A nice thesaurus implementation.
The Semantic Rhyming Dictionary
A very interesting reference, this rhyming dictionary lets you search for rhymes of any term you supply, but also for other related words, similar to a thesaurus. For example, you can specify "perfect rhyme", "homophones", "semantic siblings", "synonyms", and other relations. Fun!, nicely done, English.
Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum Searchable thesaurus in the area of Latin music from the 4th to the 17th century. Most search results are linked to scanned pictures of the notes.
Thesaurus of oriental Hebrew melodies Hierarchically browsable thesaurus (English) for all kind of oriental Hebrew music. Some hyperlinking.
Thesaurus of Geographic Names This very useful tool allows you to search for nearly 1 million geographical names (towns, countries, areas, bodies of water, etc.). Each place is described by attributes including various names (also non-English), place type, coordinates, embedment in a hyper-linked hierarchy (which might include continent-country-province), and some historical information. Developed by the Getty Information Institute.
Thesaurus Technik und Management German thesaurus for technical terms. Nice search function but no hyperlinking.
UDC Classification of WAIS databases
The Universal Decimal Classification was used in this project to attempt to classify WAIS databases. Thus the hierarchically browsable UDC is a sort of by-product of the system. The ultimate result of choosing classes is a list of WAIS databases so indexed.
Umweltthesaurus / Environmental Thesaurus
This German/English environmental thesaurus was developed by the German Federal Environmental Agency and is jointly maintained by the government environmental authorities of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It contains ca. 30,000 terms; the online version contains 8500 topterms and descriptors, and allows alphabetical browsing in German and English as well as term search in both languages. Found terms are hyperlinked to broader, narrower and other language terms. Full version downloadable. You'll have to click your way there through frames.
Umweltthesaurus der HU-Berlin
German thesaurus in the area of environment. Very short descriptions, no search function or hyperlinks.
Universal Decimal Classification
A hierarchically browsable (incomplete) version of the standard library classification system in English.
Thesaurus Verwandschaftsbeziehungen
German thesaurus in the areas of family and relations. More than 300 terms. No search function, but in alphabetical order and with a lot of hyperlinks. Click here for the introduction.
WordNet 1.5 on the Web
The official site for accessing Princeton's mammoth new thesaurus of the English language. In English, but there is an EU-financed project to develop a multilingual EuroWordNet.
Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus
English dictionary and thesaurus look up all in one, also has chat group, word of the day. Various search options result in entry including definition, pronunciation, and various types of synonyms which are all hyperlinked. From the University of Chicago ARTFL Project, which also offers various other references, including Roget's Thesaurus.
 


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Barbara Lutes <lutes@darmstadt.gmd.de>

 

 

Last modified: June 1999