Iran and Islam Medical Thesaurus: Feasibility study

Background and Nowadays, Users’ Quick Access to their information needs is one the most important challenges. As a result, organization of documents gains valuable importance in storage and retrieval systems. Among the information organization methods, indexing is a controlled language which Thesaurus is one of its tools. This research is going to study the feasibility of Iran and Islam Medical Thesaurus. This research is a descriptive survey, its information gathered through a questionnaire and the interview. Research population includes 50 staffs of Iran’s Academy of Medical Sciences and 5 professionals of the traditional medicine. Validity of the questionnaire is formal and its reliability measured through calculating Cronbach’s Alpha (85%). Findings show that Software and hardware infrastructures are in low level, and there is no independence website for the Traditional Medicine Section (TMS). Least skill level of TMS staffs due to indexing (34%) and the uppermost level skills do to familiarity with the MS Office (26%). To making entries and general/specific relations, the most word and term extraction done in Arabic language and in order to word control, the most used resources were Qanun(56%),Zakhire-ye-Kharazmshahi and Al-Aghrazol-Tebbiah. According to research findings, inappropriate software and hardware infrastructures and the lack of a reliable thesaurus through which the defining of the hierarchical levels must be made, and low skill levels of staffs to indexing are the most barriers and problems in the generation of Iran and Islam Medical Thesaurus.