A Digital Thesaurus of Ethnic Groups in the Mekong River Basin
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Review of ‘Digital Thesaurus of Ethnic Groups in the Mekong River Basin’
This paper reports an excellent study that will contribute to the progress of iField. The detailed comments are listed below:
- L144 – it will be better if proper numbering system is employed so readers can follow the sequence easily
- L152 – it will be much better if all the data sources can be presented in a table format to help readers. I also recommend that consistency will be maintained in specifying URLs.
- L178 – it will be helpful to readers if a short description of ‘the principle’ is offered.
- L293 – if a proper explanation of Figure 3 is offered, it will enhance readability.
- L296 – it begs a question whether the four objectives mentioned can be accomplished just relying on the precision and recall.
- L299 – an explanation of how 160 corpuses are composed and how 15 sets are selected is desired.
- L329 – it will be great if a heading can be provided per each result section.
Author Response
Please see the attachement.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Very interesting paper describing the developmento of tesaurus about a ethnic group using Tematres software as vocabulary server.
The struture of research is adequate but there are some minor suggestions:
In the following excerpt "A thesaurus in information science is the controlled vocabulary developed both in terms of structural and grammatical methods to compile the words used as the tool for giving the index word to the document in the information storing process.", the phrase "for giving the index word to the document" sounds strange, maybe "to provide descriptive keywords to the document" is better
Paragraph starting at line 115 that disserts abour Mekong region could be moved to the beggining of the document, where you talk about ethnic groups.
The URLs near line 361 aren`t accessible from the enconded address from PDF. Suggestion is to remove the "-" and enconde it properly.
And a final observation about the multilngual aspect of the tesaurus: each one of the registered terms are stored as one string inside Tematres. The user cannot navigate on separate languages, so if a third or fourth language is added, terms begin to appear confusing because all languages are shown at same time. This could be mentioned as research/implementation limitation due to Tematres not being capable to manage multilingua thesaurus. One suggestion is to move to OpenTheso, despite not being an "updated software" it can manage terms translations. Another alternative is to implement multilingual managemente int Tematres.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thesauri are considered an example of terminological resources, since they compile vocabularies devoted to a particular field of knowledge, in this case, ethnic groups in the Mekong River basin. In this sense, as the authors mentioned, this thesaurus contains a classification into broader and related terms, for instance. For this reason, it would be interesting to introduce a theoretical definition of the concept of "term" in contrast with that of "word", from the branch of terminology, and review the use of "word" and "term" along the text.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
