2017 Volume 59 Issue 12 Pages 839-848
Scientometrics based on large-scale bibliographic datasets has been actively investigated for an understanding of research activities and the establishment of science and technology policies. Thus, thesauri for science and technology information are increasingly used to search, classify and make clusters of articles, patents, and research data. Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) constructed and is continuously maintaining such a thesaurus since 1975; then, this time, converted the JST thesaurus and the associated dictionary, including approximately 245,000 concepts to Linked Data of Resource Description Framework, a W3C standard format and made publicly available on the Web for a limited period. In this paper, we first describe the outline of the JST thesaurus and the associated dictionary followed by features and advantages of the Linked Data version. Then, we discuss the role of the JST thesaurus as the top-level ontology, which connects several domain-specific ontologies. We also introduce our activity for ontologically rearranging the relationship among concepts in a life-science category. Finally, semi-automatic maintenance of the thesaurus using natural language processing is proposed as future work.
