Section 9.6. Thesaurus Standards


9.6. Thesaurus Standards

As we explained earlier, people have been developing thesauri for many years. In their 1993 article "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 lets us 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 (19871993, German)

  • ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (1994, 1998, 2005, United States)

In this book, we draw primarily from the original U.S. standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (1998), 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." The term "guidelines" in the title is very telling. Consider what software vendor Oracle has to say about its 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 compilerscompiler being an actual human, not a program.

What Oracle has done is taken the ideas in these guidelines and in ANSI Z39.19 . . . and used them as the basis for a specification of our own creation . . . So, Oracle supports ISO-2788 relationships or ISO-2788 compliant thesauri.

As you'll see when we explore a few examples, the ANSI/NISO standard provides simple guidelines that are very difficult to apply. The standard provides a valuable conceptual framework and in some cases offers specific rules you can follow, but it absolutely does not remove the need for critical thinking, creativity, and risk-taking in the process of thesaurus construction.

We strongly disagree with the suggestion by Krooks and Lancaster that the basic problems in this area have been solved, and we often disagree with guidelines in the ANSI/NISO standard. What's going on here? Are we just being difficult? No, what's really behind these tensions is the disruptive force of the Internet. We're in the midst of a transition from the thesaurus in its traditional form to a new paradigm embedded within the networked world.

Traditional thesauri emerged within the academic and library communities. They were used in print form and were designed primarily for expert users. When we took library science courses back in the 80s and 90s, a major component of online information retrieval involved learning to navigate the immense volumes of printed thesauri in the library to identify subject descriptors for online searching of the Dialog information service. People had to be trained to use these tools, and the underlying assumption was that specialists would use them on a regular basis, becoming efficient and effective over time. The whole system was built around the relatively high cost of processor time and network bandwidth.

Then the world changed. We're now dealing with totally online systems. We can't ask our customers to run to the library before using our web site. We're typically serving novice users with no formal training in online searching techniques. They're likely to be infrequent visitors, so they're not going to build up much familiarity with our site over time. And we're operating in the broader business environment, where the goals may be very different from those of academia and libraries.

Within this new paradigm, we're being challenged to figure out which of the old guidelines do and do not apply. It would be an awful waste to throw out valuable resources like the ANSI/NISO standard that are built upon decades of research and experience. There's a great deal that's still relevant. However, it would also be a mistake to follow the guidelines blindly, akin to using a 1950s map to navigate today's highways.

Advantages to staying close to the standard include:

  • There's good thinking and intelligence baked into these guidelines.

  • Most thesaurus management software is designed to be compliant with ANSI/NISO, so sticking with the standard can be useful from a technology-integration perspective.

  • Compliance with the standard will provide a better chance of cross-database compatibility, so when your company merges with its competitor, you might have an easier time merging the two sets of vocabularies.

Our advice is to read the guidelines, follow them when they make sense, but be prepared to deviate from the standard when necessary. After all, it's these opportunities to break the rules that make our lives as information architects fun and exciting!




Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
ISBN: 0596527349
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 194

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