The BBT federated thesauri service

The BackBone Thesaurus[1] Service provides a single online access point for humanities researchers to:

1. browse for well-formed terms or thesauri to adopt and use in their projects, 
2. map their own thesauri onto, and/or
3. contribute to managing the content of the BBT itself. 

In the backend, the service runs on the BBTalk[2] and Browser[3] tools. BBTalk, serves to integrate specialist thesauri with the BBT and to interact with curating teams to modify and extend the BBT meta-thesaurus. The BBT-Browser permits end-users to browse the BBT thesauri federation for connected specialist thesauri to discover terms and thesauri of use in their research, in order to retrieve documents of interest.

The BackBone Thesaurus (BBT for short) itself is the research outcome of work undertaken by the Thesaurus Maintenance Working Group (WG), which was established within the framework of DARIAH-EU. The BBT is an overarching meta-thesaurus for humanities research data. It offers top-level-concepts (facets and hierarchies) that can serve as the common ground for thesaurus building. It relies on a faceted classification, which is considered valid and consistent from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Among the major advantages of such a classification, is its potential expansion into new scientific domains in a sustainable and manageable fashion.

It is important to underline that the BBT, explicitly does not require domain experts to abandon their terminology in the name of some universally accepted terminology. Rather, the core feature of the BBT is that it promotes alignment of cutting-edge terminology to well-formed general terms of the meta-thesaurus capturing general meanings. This enables collaboration and cross-disciplinary resource discovery, while ensuring compatibility with thesauri that cover highly specific and developing areas of knowledge. The BBT was designed to function as an overarching thesaurus for the humanities, in order to bring together several specialist thesauri in use in the Arts and Humanities, under one common scheme.