Publisher embarks on thesaurus and indexing project

Hindawi, the publisher of 248 scholarly journals on a range of academic topics, has completed a thesaurus and indexing project with the help of semantic enrichment software.

The publisher engaged Access Innovations and its Data Harmony solution to add a semantic layer to its content and create a custom thesaurus that can be used to accurately index content with relevant vocabulary terms.

Andrew Smeall, director of product and technology for Hindawi, says, “Our experience with Access Innovations has been quite positive. This semantic layer on our content is a strong step forward in our goal of indexing manuscripts as they are submitted in order to match them automatically with editors and to enable the recommendation of appropriate peer reviewers.”

The solution to Hindawi’s semantic needs entailed a pre-existing thesaurus and rule base in conjunction with Access Innovations’ standard mining of Hindawi’s content. Access Innovations used a modified version of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) thesaurus and rule base, along with selected science and mathematics terms from other sources, to index the Hindawi content.

The majority of Hindawi’s content consists of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) topics, with a few journals from other areas including education and social science. The total size of the Hindawi’s body of content includes more than 160,000 journal articles, with approximately 16,500 new articles being published each year.

Marjorie M.K. Hlava, president and founder of Access Innovations, says, “The breadth of the Hindawi collection is a great match for the PLOS thesaurus with extensions for physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and engineering. I believe that this thesaurus and rule base will dramatically improve their indexing and their overall workflow.”