by Christos Georgis, George Bruseker and Eleni Tsouloucha (ICS-FORTH)
BBTalk is an online service designed to support collaborative interdisciplinary development and extension of thesauri. At present, it serves to support the curation of the BackBone Thesaurus (BBT), a meta-thesaurus for the humanities. This service allows for the transparent, community development of the BackBone Thesaurus by enabling users to submit suggestions for changes and additions to the terminology, as well as link specialist thesauri to the meta-thesaurus terms, while enabling the thesauri curators to jointly edit, add and delete terminology. This model of cooperative editing is linked to an online discussion system that allows thesauri curators to confer with one another, exchange views and ideas and finally determine any necessary changes to the BBT.