KABA subject heading language as the main resource subject organization tool in a semantic knowledge base

Abstract

KABA is a subject heading language used in Polish library catalogues to describe document subjects. An attempt has been made to convert KABA into a thesaurus compliant with the CIDOC CRM ontology to embed it in a semantic knowledge base comprising the foundation of the Integrated Knowledge System created in the SYNAT Project. Information objects (e.g. books) in the knowledge base are described with KABA headings, which increases the search engine recall based on the information about relations between the subjects. This paper presents the process of transforming KABA into a fully machine-readable thesaurus form and the challenges that must be overcome in order for this process to succeed. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.