New patterns for representing and visualizing the information for distributed contexts: from the thesaurus to the topic map

Abstract

The appearance of resources of information in electronic formats has made it necessary to come in a substantive way to the documentary languages and especially to the thesauri as a tool for indexation and the recovery both of textual documents and programming tools. On the part of the document makers it has become necessary to rethink the thesauri and adapt them not only to the recovery of new informative objects but to new forms of access and to the new capacities of hypertext navigation. The situation is described and evaluated for the evolution of thesauri to adapt to this new reality with special emphasis on conceptual maps and topic maps as dynamic environments better adapted to a more semantic recovery inside contextual environments of distributed information.