Lexaurus 3.1 introduces enhanced functionality, performance and interoperability

Vocabulary Management Group’s latest release of its Lexaurus terminology management solution introduces new capabilities to both editing and management functions.  Lexaurus Release 3.1 builds on the product suite’s existing strengths of combining a highly functional desktop editing application with a scalable, web-based vocabulary repository, each providing optimal user interface characteristics and open-standards interoperability.

Lexaurus Editor – New Features

Constructing and editing controlled vocabulary lists, taxonomies and thesauri is now even easier with the latest release of Lexaurus Editor. New enhancements improve drag-and-drop functionality for moving individual terms, and whole ‘trees’ of terms, within and between vocabularies, enabling quick and simple modification of hierarchies, re-use of terminology sets and mapping between vocabularies. 

Managing Term Relationships: New colour-coded term descriptions now visibly differentiate between Narrower Terms containing further ‘child’ terms, from those whose contents are Related or Non-Preferred Terms, thereby simplifying the editing process.  Beyond the standard hierarchical, associative and equivalency relationships, Lexaurus Editor now facilitates custom development of bespoke Relationship Types through a new user-configurable interface, in which the automatic creation of reciprocal relationships is also established. These include partitive relationships, where term ‘X’ can be defined as a part of term ‘Y’, and through use of relationship ‘weightings’, to indicate varying degrees of relationship between terms.

Version Control: Adding to the product’s existing session log, all modifications undertaken of vocabularies are now retained in an auditable History report, which can be exported in XML format to list either all changes performed between selectable revisions, or the differences (delta’s), between two revision levels. This new feature improves tracking of changes throughout the life of a vocabulary, and facilitates ‘roll-back’ to earlier versions, as required.

Customisable Preference Settings: Configuration enhancements have been introduced to aid interchangeable schema configurations, together with definable import and export settings, to help organisations standardise on data interchange formats. Preferences can also be defined to automatically generate term and vocabulary identifiers in required formats, and to automatically capture updated date fields on creation and edit.

Lexaurus Bank – New Features

Vocabularies constructed in Lexaurus Editor can quickly be uploaded into the web repository, Lexaurus Bank, to provide an online, centralised source of controlled vocabularies for use across organisations, or even whole industry sectors.

Improved Search: Lexaurus Bank’s role of managing published terms and vocabularies for viewing across the internet has been enhanced in Release 3.1 with a radically improved search capability based on the Lucene Solr search engine. Users can now even more quickly identify specific terms and vocabularies utilising a range of search techniques, ascertaining term relationships, context, previous iterations and unique web address identifier, and download these for a range of content classification tasks. Browser-based look-up is now further supported by caching terminology sets after initial download, thus speeding up system response time and reducing system overhead during subsequent searching and browsing.

Web Services: Systems integration, achievable via Bank’s standards-based RESTful interface, has also been enhanced through establishment of persistent URI’s for all repository content, thereby ensuring the terminology uniqueness necessary for optimal Web Service synchronisation.