Thesaurus
Early release of Chapter Four, from my upcoming book, Ontology Pipeline
At the close of the last chapter, we reached the thesaurus horizon. We had a working SKOS taxonomy for the Financial literacy branch of a taxonomy, with preferred labels, a broader/narrower hierarchy, definitions, and alternative labels, all of it built and validated. Then we added a single associative link: Financial literacy is related to Workforce development, two concepts that are meaningfully connected even though neither one sits above the other. That one triple is the doorway into this chapter.
A thesaurus is a taxonomy that has grown up. It keeps everything the taxonomy gave us and, as the Ontology Pipeline promises, everything from the taxonomy remains. We do not start over. Instead, we extend. The taxonomy you’ve already built becomes the backbone of a richer structure. This chapter is about what that richer structure adds, what it means for AI, and where its edges are. Most of all, it is about how to mature a taxonomy, the SKOS you wrote in Chapter 3, to include the equivalence and associative relationships that turn it into a thesaurus.
