The Transportation Research Thesaurus: Capabilities and Enhancements (2018)

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49 As part of the initial stakeholder interviews and other discussions regarding the TRT, the research team sought to identify goals and objectives. The following were specifically docu- mented during the stakeholder interviews and the in-person meeting with the project panel and have been considered in development of the draft strategic and immediate action plans provided as Appendixes A and B, respectively, of this report: • Produce derivative products, some of which may be revenue generators. • Support state DOTs. Some are developing their own thesauri and the TRT should minimally be able to be used as a starting point. • Support a larger pipeline of candidate terms. • Proactively incorporate terms to ensure literary warrant is aligned with current research practice. • Support a broader information community including operational terms. • Incorporate liberal use of equivalent terms, particularly acronyms. • Support multilingual capabilities, including the integration of non-English terms from the ITRD Thesaurus. • Integrate information across TRB systems (the current 32 subject areas are inadequate). • Provide a management capability for the TRT while not putting the thesaurus functionality of TRID at risk. • Provide more management and governance support through out-of-the box delivery of searching, reporting, and exporting capabilities. • Improve the capability of the thesaurus management team to use the TMS product to trace the lifecycles of proposed, candidate, provisional, approved, and not-approved terms. • Improve the control and management of non-preferred terms within the TMS. • Use the TRT for discovery by non-information professionals. • Serve more customers and conduct outreach or the TRT’s usage will not be significant enough to warrant even the current investment. • Add relationships and include more associative and equivalence terms to improve the semantic richness. • Improve usability, including a better visual experience for SMEs. • Provide the ability to incorporate other transportation information beyond TRID, which might include state data to allow for better state comparisons and performance, enabling TRID and other resources to be used together. • Create collaborative partnerships. • Increase transportation community engagement by providing a domain-level governance model. • Better support the maintenance process, making it easier to add and change terms to keep the TRT up-to-date. C h a p t e r 6 Strategic and Immediate Action Plan Development

50 the transportation research thesaurus: Capabilities and enhancements • Support the TRT’s reuse by other systems. • Integrate with mobile technologies. • Build metrics into the system to support metrics-driven decisions. • Include all use cases in the vision. The following constraints were identified for consideration when determining strategies and activities for achieving these goals and objectives: • The limitations of long-term staff budget constraints make workflow and governance important. • Increased involvement by the transportation information, data, knowledge, and research management communities could provide a mechanism for increased efficiency and effec- tiveness in managing the TRT. • Increased scope and coverage for the TRT means more terms that require improved full lifecycle management, from proposed through final approval/non-approval, and increased control over non-preferred terms. • Consider the more detailed equivalent or USE/UF relationships (e.g., spelling variants, com- mon misspelling, generic nouns, trade names, dialectical variants, antonyms, etc.) that might be helpful in the future. (Minimally, the list from the ISO standard could serve as a checklist for the inclusion or enhancement of related terms.) • Consider who the TRT’s power users are (or will be). Who will want to export or access the TRT to create designer applications? It is important to learn about their interests and requirements.