Astronomy Thesaurus Help

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What is the Astronomy Thesaurus?

If this is your first contact with the thesaurus, please read the introduction from the paper edition that outlines it's contents and use.

Introduction to the Web Interface

I have tried to make the use of the web interface to the Astronomy Thesaurus as intuitive as possible. However my idea of intuitive may not be yours! Please let me know if there is something that you would find helpful, and I'll try to include it in any new versions (send me email at David.Fullagar@anu.edu.au).

Basic Techniques

The most important feature of the web is a hyperlink. All hyperlinks in the web interface to the Astronomy Thesaurus take you to related information, be it a different language, another term in the thesaurus, or an index and search page. I doubt you have got this far without knowing how to recognise a link, but just in case here is one (that takes you to the bottom of this page).

Symbols and Bars

The thesaurus pages contain these navigational helpers.

[Thesaurus Home]

This takes you back to the front thesaurus page.

Index and Search

English French German Italian Spanish

The flags (or language names, if you aren't loading images) take you to the main index and search page for that language.

[ English | French | German | Italian | Spanish ]

At the top of thesaurus entries, there is a navigation bar to allow you to flip between languages. The current language will be the italicised (but non link) name. Note that the order of the language doesn't change when different languages are selected - however the spelling reverts to the language of the page.

[ JEANS MASS | MASSE DE JEANS | JEANS-MASSE | MASSA DI JEANS | MASA DE JEANS ]

This is an example of the second top navigation bar from a thesaurus entry. Like the bar described above, this allows you to change language for the current entry - however, here the entry title is given in the language link.

0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

On index pages, an alphabet navivation bar is used to allow access to the different pages that make up the index. In the hierarchical list, this type of bar allow quick scrolling to different parts of the alphabetical listing.

[Back]

Remember the "Back" button in your browser can often help when moving around web pages in general, and the thesaurus in particular.

The Index

The index pages for each language include an alphabet navigation bar that accesses a new page for each letter. These letter pages then contain an alphabetical listing of the thesaurus entries. Unfortunately these are rather squashed together - however there are alot of entries to include, and I didn't want to make the pages too long.

The Hierarchical List

As in the paper version, there is a hierarchical listing of the thesaurus entries. This is available from the main index and search page for each language (via the flags, or language names navigation bar described above). The alphabet navigational bar will scroll you to the appropriate place in the main listing. Links then take you to hierarchical sub lists, which in turn take you to the main thesaurus entries. (I hope to add links from the main thesaurus entries back into the hierarchical list in a future version of the web interface.)

Searching

Each main language index page has a search field at the bottom that allows you to enter a word, or series of words, that will be searched for in the thesaurus. Matching items are displayed as links. Further information about searching can be found from the documentation links on search result pages.

Language Support

Please read the introduction to the multilingual supplement for information about the format of languages presented here.

A Local Copy?

I plan to make the code that generates this web interface available for others to use as soon as it is stable. The main concern for mirroring these page on another server, is disk space. Because of the five languages, there are 17,000 plus pages that amount to about 40 megabytes. A couple of simple to install programs will also allow local searching to be implemented.

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