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In the present cyber world, it is necessary to have a good understanding about the topic and choose the right query term to retrieve exhaustive, related information in the field of veterinary science. Studies of on-line use have revealed that subject searches are the most frequent type of search, yet a surprising number of subject searches (30-50%) fail to retrieve records whatsoever. The causes of search failure appear to be, lack of thesaurus, misspelling, mistyping of search terms and problems in understanding the use of Boolean logic.
If a veterinarian lacks domain knowledge, when looking for information on a specific topic, the retrieval process can be a real challenge. There are number of robots with vocabulary control devices for the field of Medical Sciences such as HONSelect. But there is no single robot for Veterinary Sciences, which is also an important field of Life Sciences. An attempt has been made in this research work to study the role of thesaurus in retrieval of Veterinary information. The aim is to grasp in a better way how a thesaurus can help to improve the retrieval effectiveness by using queries generally utilized by the veterinarians. The search engine has been named as ‘Info4vets.in’
The study suggests that the semantic knowledge provided by a thesaurus can be useful for veterinary retrieval in two ways. Its lexical information can be used as a controlled vocabulary to overcome problems with synonymous and lexical variance and its relational knowledge is potentially useful for identifying preferred term and abbreviation etc.,
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