[GeoNetwork-users] Purpose of thesauri management application

[<Joe...@gi...>]

Hi,

I'd like to know what the purpose is of the thesaurus management 
application integrated in the Geonetwork administrator part.

It allows you to manage the content of 5 RDF/SKOS thesauri, external or 
local, but:
- only the thesaurus of type "place" is available, i.e. the file 
"regions.rdf";
- its content matches the content of these 2 related tables "regions" and 
"regionsdes" in the Geonetwork catalogue database, but as far as I can 
tell, there is no relation between the local RDF file and the content of 
these tables...?
- the RDF file (XML) is not referenced by any of the XML Schema's 
(ISO-19115, ISO-19139,...) or metadata instances (for validation 
purposes).

In short, I do not understand the purpose of the thesaurus management 
application with regard to the Geonetwork catalogue.
Probably, it is to be considered a separate application that happens to be 
integrated in Geonetwork.

I cannot find any explanation on this in the Geonetwork documentation, 
user lists, developer lists etc.

Thanks,
Joeri