Thesauri

Use in information profession evolved in 1950s.
-Structured list of terms can be used to support retrieval of relevant items.

Commonly thought of as e.g. Roget's thesaurus. This complements a dictionary. 833807

This could actually be thought of as classification scheme - there is an ordering principle for words.

Application: can provide subject keywords for abstracting and indexing services. Can also provide keywords for metadata schemes.

Alphabetical display of terms

Must have system of cross-referencing

Uses for a thesaurus

Indexing tool: used for large technical document collections

BT - Broader Terms; RT - Related Terms; NT - Narrower Terms

Other types of systematically controlled languages; classification schemes; taxonomies, concept/topic maps and ontologies; alphabetically arranged, word-based language; keyword lists.

Olsen - construction of a thesaurus

Facet analysis - methodology for building classification schemes. Ranganathan . Linguistic analysis of concepts in a subject area

Relationship construction: equivalence, hierarchical and associative.

Final term selection: changed to an appropriate grammatical form.

Subject headings: for example, abstracts in the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) are indexed with a general term from the LISA thesaurus.

Commercial databases: Used for scholarly and research purposes.

For local collections: to support meeting retrieval needs of users.

As a source of metadata

As a search tool