Description

This thesis was written in the course of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) project
aimed at visualizing the thesaurus used in the International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
online database.
The first part of the paper comprises a brief historical review of the development of thesauri,
providing an overview of tools for categorizing knowledge and covering a spectrum from wordnets
to folksonomies.
The second part discusses existing strategies for displaying thesauri and explores basic
considerations concerning the technical realization of visualizing a thesaurus as a Web application.
A considerable portion of the publication is devoted to the concrete implementation of the INIS
project. Special attention is given to the methodologies and techniques applied in client side
programming, as completely new approaches have been developed in this area recently.