Systematic Organization of Knowledge of a Specific Area in the Form of Dictionary

Abstract

This paper describes a way of organizing large knowledge base which aims at human use in book form and in hyper-text system. This is based on the experience of the author when he was the chief editor of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science published by Iwanami Book Co. The book includes about 4500 entry terms and about 13000 index terms. The total pages are about 1200, in which about 800 pages are for the description of entry terms, 100 pages for a hierarchical tree representation of entry terms, and 300 pages for KWIC index table. The paper describes how the terminological words were systematically collected, and how these terms were organized into a hierarchical tree structure. Then the way of giving definition for each term is described in detail. Intensional definition, extensional definition, functional and other definitions are to be given by considering always the similarity and distinctness to other related terms. Finally the access methods to the information are described. Users have not necessarily an exact term to consult the encyclopedia. KWIC-form organization of index terms based on radix of compound terms is quite useful for such user situations. The hierarchical tree organization of terms is useful for the understanding of the whole structure of the area of computer science, and for the access to what users want to know. There are several other access methods provided for in the description part of each term.