ABSTRACT
The World Wide Web and the use of HTML-based information displays has greatly increased access to online information sources, but at the same time limits the ways in which they can be used. By the same token, Web-based indexing and search engines give us access to the full text of billions of online documents, but make it difficult to access them in any kind of organized, systematic way. For years before the advent of the Internet, lexicographers built well-structured subject thesauri to organize large collections of documents. These have since been converted into electronic form and even put online, but in ways that are largely uncoordinated and not useful for searching. Until they can be brought together in a coordinated, semantically interoperable way, and offer to searchers dynamic and easy-to-use applications for subject access, they will continue to lie dormant while chaos reigns on the Internet.
