Loganathan, S: ing of an Information Retrieval System

In the present cyber world, it is necessary to have a good understanding about the topic and choose the right query term to retrieve exhaustive, relevant information. Studies of on-line use have revealed that subject searches are the most frequent type of search, yet a surprising number of subject searches (30-50%) fail to retrieve records whatsoever. The causes of search failure appears to be, lack of thesaurus, misspelling, mistyping of search terms and problems in understanding the use of Boolean logic. If a veterinarian lacks domain knowledge, when looking for information on a specific topic, the retrieval process can be a real challenge An attempt has been made in this work to study the role of thesaurus in retrieval of Veterinary information. The aim is to grasp in a better way how a thesaurus can help to improve the retrieval effectiveness by using queries generally utilized by the veterinarians. The study suggests the lexical information can be used as a controlled vocabulary to overcome problems with synonymous and lexical variance and its relational knowledge is potentially useful for identifying preferred term and abbreviation etc.,