ConceptChoir Overview

Welcome to WebChoir ConceptChoir, the fastest and easiest way to create a vocabulary and other hierarchical databases. Whether you are an experienced vocabulary builder or brand new to vocabulary building, ConceptChoir provides you with a complete set of tools to simplify vocabulary construction.

So what is ConceptChoir? For information producers, ConceptChoir is a tool for organizing, normalizing, indexing, linking, and switching. For information consumers, ConceptChoir is a tool for browsing, navigating, searching, refining, and retrieving.

ConceptChoir is a new kind of Web-based vocabulary construction and retrieval system. It allows the user to develop hierarchical vocabularies and any other hierarchical authority lists easily and quickly, to create Web sites from the vocabularies and hierarchical authority lists automatically, to integrate (index and search) the Internet sources with the vocabularies and hierarchical authority lists effectively, to browse and navigate hierarchical vocabularies and other hierarchical authority lists efficiently, and to search and retrieve information organized and indexed by the vocabulary accurately.

The product will let the user create hierarchical vocabularies either based on the NISO standard z39.19 or a user-definable structure. Such vocabularies can be used to index and classify information to improve recall and precision in retrieval by eliminating the synonym and homonym problems that exist in the natural language, by bringing related documents together, and by presenting information in a hierarchical context.

WebChoir supports the development of parallel universes with its multilingual support (Canada requires French and English, the EU requires several European languages, many multinationals do business globally). Searches entered in one language can be automatically switched to search collections in another language.

Moreover, WebChoir facilitates the retrieval and exchange of data elements using standardized tools such as XML and MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) so that data residing in ConceptChoir and other systems are accessible and exchangeable.

Whether your goal is to create a small authority list for yourself or your work group, a large enterprise-wide vocabulary system, or even distributed information indexing and retrieval system spanning the globe via the Internet or your corporate intranet, ConceptChoir has the tools you need.