During my last term in graduate school, I took a thesaurus construction course (LIS 537) where our task was to select an intellectual domain and to research, design & build a 100-term thesaurus for that domain. My group chose Buddhism.

The Process

Thesaurus construction involves a great amount of learning, and my colleagues and I first set out to absorb as much as we could of Buddhist literature. We checked out and bought books, scoured the web, and pored over articles from academic journals. After this initial frenzy, we determined that we could not, in 10 weeks, digest it all nor limit ourselves to 100 terms. So we decided to attempt a cursory survey of Buddhism from the perspective of a novice. Thus, we titled our project "The Beginner's Buddhist Thesaurus".

Traditionally, the creation of a thesaurus would involve harvesting terms from literature, writing them down on cards (known as "Soergel cards"), and tracking the relationships between all the terms on those cards. If any term or its relation to other terms changed, the cards themselves had to be edited by hand. This was all incredibly time consuming. Most of our colleagues were using this technique with a little help from spreadsheet software, but I was determined to save our group time and effort. So, over a weekend, I built a web-based thesaurus management system in Zope. It was messy and slow, but it worked. And it is still working.

The tool freed us to experiment with the relationships of terms in the thesaurus and, as a result, explore the structure of Buddhism as a knowledge domain. Throughout this process, we found ourselves discussing deep philosophical concepts, which we otherwise would never have considered.

Reflection

I feel that I learned, in addition to all the Buddhist concepts and thesaurus construction techniques, much about project management and teamwork through this experience. In retrospect, it may not have been the best use of my time to build a web application just for this project. However, if I ever need to build another thesaurus from scratch, it's there.

Artifacts

• The Beginner's Buddhist Thesaurus
• PDF version of The Beginner's Buddhist Thesaurus