Not-for-profit life sciences publisher CABI, UK, has announced that the CAB Thesaurus has had its biggest update in 30 years. The Thesaurus, projected as a comprehensive controlled vocabulary covering applied life sciences and related subject areas, has reportedly grown 40 percent in just one year. It now includes nearly 137,000 terms.
The resource contains the scientific names and synonyms for pest- and disease-causing organisms, birds, mammals, insects and other species and details the relationships between them. It seeks to play a vital role in ensuring the quality and consistency of all content produced by CABI. It is also licensed by CABI to a wide variety of other organisations to categorise and index their own content.
Additions to the new edition include 10,000 nematode species mentioned in CABI online databases (http://www.cabdirect.org); world lists of birds, mammals, sucking lice (Anoplura) and trichodectid chewing lice (Mallophaga), with synonyms; complete revisions to the existing taxonomic hierarchies in the thesaurus of dinoflagellates and algae; and 7,275 new insect species from the Medani database, which contains species of veterinary and medical importance.
It is projected that the CAB Thesaurus will double in size in the next five years, and several innovations will be introduced to make it much more than just a controlled vocabulary. The most important of these will be to include semantic features into the thesaurus to make it fit for new CABI products and for wider use as part of the semantic web.
The CAB Thesaurus is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and is currently being translated in its entirety into Farsi.
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