TMWG_posterFweb


THE BACKBONE THESAURUS USER STORIES

BBT ID  
The Backbone Thesaurus (BBT) is the research outcome of work undertaken by the 
Thesaurus Maintenance WG in an effort to design and establish a coherent 
overarching meta-thesaurus for the Humanities [1]. It is a faceted classification 
scheme that favors a loose integration of multiple thesauri, by offering a small set of 
top-level concepts (facets and hierarchies) for specialist thesauri terms to map to.

Curation
The BBT [2] is systematically curated by a cross disciplinary team of editors coming 
from organisations participating in the TMWG (AA, FORTH, DAI, FRANTIQ/CNRS), 
through BBTalk, an online editing and communication tool designed to support 
collaborative, interdisciplinary development and extension of thesauri.

Partner vocabularies and thesauri
The controlled vocabularies/thesauri that have been mapped to the BBT to this day 
are: the iDAI.welt Thesaurus [3], the DYAS Humanities Thesaurus [4], the Parthenos 
Vocabularies [5] and the Language of Binding Thesaurus [6]. Members of the working 
group are working towards integrating the PACTOLS [7], the Taxonomy of Digital 
Research Activities in the Humanities (TADiRAH) [8] and the Arts and Architecture 
Thesaurus [9] with the BBT.

Why adopt the BBT
- BBT has a logical and easily accessible structure
- It makes use of a small number of top-level concepts
- It allows the subsumption of any local thesaurus: scholars are not required 
 to quit using their terms of preference.
- It promotes objectivity and interdisciplinarity. It allows integration of terms 
 from different scientific fields and enables cross-disciplinary resource discovery
- It is a community driven initiative that offers peer scientific support
- It can also serve as a basis for thesaurus building (and restructuring)

Benefits from joining the Thesaurus Federation 
H. Goulis, Academy of Athens, E. Tsouloucha, ICS-FORTH

Current Main Editors
Martin Doerr, Helen Katsiadakis, Helen Goulis, Eleni Tsouloucha, Chrysoula Bekiari, 
Lida Charami, Gerasimos Chrysovitsanos, Camilla Colombi, Patricia Kalafata, 
Annika Kirscheneder, Blandine Nouvel, Evelyne Sinigaglia, Yorgos Tzedopoulos

References:
Thesaurus Maintenance Working Group (2019). DARIAH Backbone Thesaurus (BBT): Definition of a model for sustainable interoperable thesauri maintenance, Version 1.2.2. Greece: May 2019 https://www.backbonethesaurus.eu/sites/default/files/DARIAH_BBT%20v%201.2.2%20draft%20v1.pdf;

Georgis Ch., Bruseker G., Tsouloucha E. (2019). BBTalk: An Online Service for Collaborative and Transparent Thesaurus Curation, ERCIM News 116, Special theme: Transparency in Algorithmic Decision Making 
https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en116/r-i/bbtalk-an-online-service-for-collaborative-and-transparent-thesaurus-curation;

Daskalaki M., Charami L. (2017). A Back Bone Thesaurus for Digital Humanities, ERCIM News 111, October 2017, Special theme: Digital Humanities https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en111/special/a-back-bone-thesaurus-for-digital-humanities; 

M. Daskalaki, M. Doerr, 2017. Philosophical background assumptions in digitized knowledge representation systems, in Dia-noesis: A Journal of Philosophy, 2017, Issue 3, p 17-28; https://www.backbonethesaurus.eu/sites/default/files/Philosophical%20background%20assumptions.pdf;

Thesaurus Maintenance Working Group (2015). Thesaurus Maintenance Methodological Outline. Greece 2015 https://www.backbonethesaurus.eu/sites/default/files/workingpaperonthesaurusmaintenance29_05_2015.pdf.

This work is licensed under 
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International Licence

Scan or go to https://youtu.be/QdDEGN-jiRY
to watch BBT User stories

“In the reality of the data BBT is one of our major goals 
and will bring together 190 years of cataloguing and 
tagging of knowledge and creating knowledge 
systems”.

Reinhard Förtsch (DAI)

“We had an old fashioned thesaurus, we realised 
we have to change its structure and make a step 
toward a conceptual framework”

“The BBT improved the quality of our work”

“We flagged up a number of redundancies in our 
thesaurus which could not be resolved before 
adopting BBT”

Blandine Nouvel (FRANTIQ-CNRS)

“When the DAI is doing world archaeology nowadays 
we try to become interoperable. With the BBT we had a 
target. And that was the great thing. The greatest 
learning curve for people entering the digital world is 
that you need clean schemes”.

“In the future the BBT will have a very central role in the 
way DAI presents its data on the web with the FAIR 
implementation. BBT is one of the hallmarks of this 
kind of thinking”.

[1] https://www.backbonethesaurus.eu/

[2] https://vocabs.dariah.eu/backbone_thesaurus/en/

[3] http://thesauri.dainst.org/_fe65f286

[4] https://humanitiesthesaurus.academyofathens.gr

[5] https://isl.ics.forth.gr/parthenos_vocabularies/

[6] https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lob/ 

[7] https://pactols.frantiq.fr/opentheso/ 

[8] http://tadirah.dariah.eu/vocab/

[9] https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/

DARIAH-EU Virtual Annual Event 2020: Scholarly Primitives, November 10-13, 2020

Evelyne Sinigaglia (FRANTIQ-CNRS) 

Links