An earlier project which examined thesaurus use was the City Interactive Linguistic Knowledge System (CILKS) project, carried out by members of the Centre for Interactive Systems Research between 1991 and 1994. [2].
The objective was to exploit thesaurus knowledge for query enhancement in probabilistic systems using KBS techniques. The INSPEC document database and thesaurus were loaded into an Oracle RDBMS, and a system for interactive thesaurus navigation was implemented. A series of small-scale laboratory-based evaluation experiments was conducted, to collect data and to ascertain how users selected terms from the thesaurus and whether these terms helped to improve the performance of the original query. General conclusions from the project were:
The CILKS work pointed the way for further research to examine interactive thesaurus consultation, whereby users could see the thesaurus at any time during the search process. It also indicated that thesaurus navigation might usefully be linked to other probabilistic query enhancement methods. The ENQUIRE project was intended to build on this work.