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Abstract
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The Transportation Research Thesaurus (TRT) is a tool to improve the indexing and retrieval of transportation information. The TRT is used by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and a variety of other organizations to support indexing, search, and retrieval of research documents, technical reports, and other information about transportation. The TRT also assists information users by facilitating consistency in language and cataloging information across repositories. At the same time, the TRT provides a basis for users who wish to tailor their own information storage and retrieval systems for their specific needs. While the TRT applies to "research" in particular, the TRT's application is broader, cover- ing all modes and aspects of transportation and thereby providing a common and consistent language for communication among producers and users of transportation information. The TRT is curated and maintained by TRB with input from the TRT Subcommittee. The TRT web page—http://trt.trb.org/—allows for searching and browsing the thesaurus in various formats.
The TRT originated as a tool to support TRB's Transportation Research Information Ser- vices (TRIS) database, as described in NCHRP Report 450: Transportation Research Thesaurus and User's Guide (Batty 2001), enabling indexers to describe documents in a consistent way and TRIS users to more easily retrieve relevant TRIS records in their areas of interest by searching the thesaurus terms. The TRIS database subsequently was consolidated with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Joint Transport Research Centre's International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database into Transport Research International Documentation (TRID), the world's largest and most comprehensive bibliographic source on transportation information. TRID contains more than one million records of published infor- mation and ongoing research, covering all modes and disciplines of transportation. The TRID database is available on TRB's website at http://trid.trb.org.
If the TRT is to maintain its value to a growing community of stakeholders, it must evolve to improve the user experience, make its services accessible to a broader range of users, accommo- date changing transportation technology, adapt to changing international information man- agement practices, and take advantage of advances in information technology. For example, the TRT's functionality should ultimately facilitate (a) straightforward mapping between the TRT's terms and those employed in the thesauri and other information management tools of other organizations; (b) implementation and maintenance of scalable and robust standards-based thesaurus management software (TMS); (c) an export function to enable users to adapt the TRT to meet their specific needs; and (d) use of the TRT by a wider range of producers, users, and curators of transportation information ... |