Designing a Semantic Network for Qajarid Government Documents Held at the National Archives of Iran

To design a semantic network for Qajarid government documents through categorization and establishing thesaurus relations

The present research is applied in terms of purpose.  Quantitative, qualitative, and exploratory content analysis method are employed. Maxqda software was used to conceptualize the network and to understand systematic and hierarchical relationship among concepts. By analyzing most frequently used concepts in documents, a semantic network was drawn by coding. SPSS and Excel software are used in the quantitative part.

In determining the main concepts of documents, we found that with 6920 sub-categories, the highest frequency belongs to titles and positions of people. Considering its importance in the bureaucratic structure of the time. Due to the importance of this concept in the bureaucratic structure, semantic network resulted  was drawn using thesaurus architecture (hierarchical, equivalence, dependent). Such semantic networks are based on all main and sub-categories extracted from the concept of titles and positions. Main categories include financial, military, royal court, administrative, religious and judicial titles and positions. Financial positions with (34%) found to be the most frequent. One. Financial positions of Mostofi, Mostofia-ol-Mamalek were most frequently used sub-categories

The semantic network drawn is one method of information retrieval that uses semantic knowledge to determine thematic areas for analysis and conceptualization information needs of researchers. This conceptual map helps developing a more precise and efficient ontology for organization archival records. In the present study we attempted to adopt new strategies for enclosing and mastering the conceptual vocabulary of Qajarid documents and constructing patterns in the field of semantic relations in an understandable way for computers and retrieval systems so that both indexers and searchers (subject matter specialists and terminologists) can make good use of the breadth and context of the connection among concepts and ideas associated with them.