The impact of specificity on the retrieval power of a UDC-based multilingual thesaurus

Abstract

The article describes the research done over a bibliographic database in order to show the impact the specificity of the knowledge organising tools may have on information retrieval. For this purpose two multilingual UDC-based thesauri having different degrees of specificity are considered. Issues of harmonising a classificatory structure with a thesaurus structure are introduced and significant aspects of information retrieval in a multilingual environment are argued in an extensive manner. Aspects of complementarity are discussed with particular emphasis on the real impact produced by alternative search facilities on IR. Finally a number of conclusions are formulated as they arise from the study.