From Athenawiki

Prefer the use of thesauri (to other types of terminologies)

Among all existing types of terminology resources, we recommend the use of thesauri for museums in order to make their collections available to Europeana. First, this type of terminology is quite easy to SKOSify as the SKOS format is intended – even mainly designed to handle thesauri, so that it can technically comply with the main requirement of Europeana ingestion process. Then, if we compare with the other terminology types, thesaurus features a good mix of richness and usability. Moreover, museums are generally already used to employing this kind of terminology rather than ontology to describe their collections in a well-structured manner

Focus terminologies on specific domains and then create bridges between them

Rather than trying to constitute one big thesaurus for all the areas to deal with, we recommend the museums keeping and feeding their existing specific-domain-thesauri without broadening them to other domains. It sounds better to add new thesauri to cover new domains, and to set up bridges between the thesauri if the retrieval issue on Europeana requires a cross-domain browsing.

Be “general user oriented”

of who is accessing is taken into account, the more efficient the portal should be. Requests will not be expressed by professionals, but by the general public. It means the Europeana meta- terminology does comply with what the general public is “functionally” expecting. If a candidate thesaurus has natively been designed in the same mood, we can guess that it will work fine on the portal. Thus we recommend the museums designing thesauri by considering the skills, habits and expectancies of the general users than the professionals as well. It means both two approaches can be considered in the meantime as complementary: 1/ the “bottomup” approach consists in starting from the needs and habits of the professionals to determine the terminology; 2/ the “top-down” approach on the contrary in coming from the specificities of the access and research by the general users.