IRRI's Rice Thesarus Updated

IRRI’s Rice Thesaurus is an online tool for searching standard rice and rice-related terms and their subject hierarchies. Since its publication on the WWW in early 2009, the thesaurus has been freely available for use by researchers worldwide, 24 hours a day. It is hosted by the National Agricultural Library of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture at this URL : http://agclass.nal.usda.gov/irri/rice_search.shtml .

As a term is typed on the search box, the subject tree, showing narrower, broader, or related terms, appears on screen. Aside from the subject hierarchy, an important newly added feature of the thesaurus is the ability to search terms of interest in Google, Yahoo, IRRI’s rice database, and Agricola, a major international agricultural database produced by NAL without leaving the Thesaurus platform. By simply clicking on the links provided on the right side of the screen, the researcher could easily generate a list of literature related to his field of interest without retyping the term. This saves time and effort on the part of the user.

The thesaurus, which uses the MultiTes thesaurus construction application, is intended to be a dynamic electronic reference source, hence periodic updates need to be incorporated therein. From May up to early July 2010, the IRRI Library and Documentation Service, with support from the Communication and Publications Services and Program 6, hired the services of Ms. Milagros Zamora, former Assistant Librarian and bibliographer of IRRI, to search, add new terms, and create subject trees. Ms. Zamora consulted numerous recent books and peer-reviewed articles on rice and came up with 680 new terms with subject hierarchies. The new file was sent to Ms. Lori Finch, Thesaurus specialist of the NAL, who coordinates the uploading of the new file on the NAL web site. This is the second update done on the Thesaurus. The new terms are now visible on the IRRI Thesaurus web. site.

Thesaurus Updating is expected to be an annual project of the IRRI Library.