Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Thesaurus Standards

As we explained earlier, people have been developing thesauri for many years. In “The Evolution of Guidelines for Thesaurus Construction,” David A. Krooks and F.W. Lancaster suggested that “the majority of basic problems of thesaurus construction had already been identified and solved by 1967.”

This rich history allows us to draw from a number of national and international standards, covering the construction of monolingual (single-language) thesauri. For example:

• ISO 2788 (1974, 1985, 1986, International)

• BS 5723 (1987, British)

• AFNOR NFZ 47-100 (1981, French)

• DIN 1463 (1987-1993, German)

• ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (1994, United States)

In this book, we draw primarily from the U.S. standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.19, which is very similar to the International standard, ISO 2788. The ANSI/NISO standard is entitled “Guidelines for the Construction, Format and Management of Monolingual Thesauri” and is available for purchase online (http://www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=518). The term “guidelines” in the title is very telling. Consider what software vendor Oracle has to say about their interpretation of this standard:

The phrase . . . thesaurus standard is somewhat misleading. The computing industry considers a “standard” to be a specification of behavior or interface. These standards do not specify anything. If you are looking for a thesaurus function interface, or a standard thesaurus file format, you won’t find it here. Instead, these are guidelines for thesaurus ...