Web Thesaurus Compendium

Thesauri and classifications categorized according to descriptors extracted from the OECD Macrothesaurus

aerospace industry / AIDS / archaeology / architecture / art / astronomy / chemistry / economic and social development / economics / education / Egypt / environment / folk culture / food preparation / general / geography / government / graphic arts / health / industry / legislation / linguistics / literature / mathematics / medicine / military activity / music / patents / proteins / psychology / research / sign-language / social sciences / technics / transportation / women
 

aerospace industry	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).
AIDS	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.
archaeology	Archaeological Objects Thesaurus A hierarchical and alphabetical thesaurus of archaeological object types. In English.
architecture	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.
art	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.
astronomy	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.
chemistry	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.
economic and social development	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.
economics	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.
education	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.
Egypt	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.
environment	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) 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. Umweltthesaurus der HU-Berlin German thesaurus in the area of environment. Very short descriptions, no search function or hyperlinks.
folk culture	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!
food preparation	Asia - Vegetable Thesaurus A hierarchically browsable thesaurus for Asian vegetables. With pictures and translations in other languages, but no search function. 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.
general	Universal Decimal Classification A hierarchically browsable (incomplete) version of the standard library classification system in Englisch. 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. 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. 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. 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.  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. 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. 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).  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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
geography	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.
government	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.
graphic arts	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. 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.
health	Health Promotion Theasurus 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.
industry	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.
legislation	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. 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.
linguistics	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). 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. 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. 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.
literature	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. 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. 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.
mathematics	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.
medicine	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. Dr. Antonius Gesundheits-Server Thesaurus-based search engine for medical terms. Lists only German websites.
military activity	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. 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.
music	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 melodiesHierarchically browsable thesaurus (English) for all kind of oriental Hebrew music. Some hyperlinking.
patents	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.
proteins	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.
psychology	Fachgebärdenlexikon Psychologie German thesaurus which contains over 900 terms in sign-language in the area of psychology. Index in English as well.
research	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
sign-language	Fachgebärdenlexikon Psychologie German thesaurus which contains over 900 terms in sign-language in the area of psychology. Index in English as well.
social sciences	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. 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. 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.
technics	Thesaurus Technik und Management German thesaurus for technical terms. Nice search function but no hyperlinking.
transportation	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.
women	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").

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Last modified: June 1999