“Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated”

Despite its name, the thesaurus was quite often at a loss for words.

The thesaurus: the only mention of a controlled vocabulary in English literature

[Captain] Hook and Peter [Pan] are now, as it were, alone on the island. Below, Peter is on the bed, asleep, no weapon near him;

above, Hook, armed to the teeth, is searching noiselessly for some tree down which the nastiness of him can descend. … Down this

the pirate wriggles a passage. In the aperture below his face emerges and goes green as he glares at the sleeping child. Does no feeling of compassion disturb his sombre breast? The man is not wholly evil: he has a Thesaurus in his cabin, and is no mean

performer on the flute.

J. M. Barrie Peter Pan Act IV

If thesaurus is not a form of conscience, then it may be a form of ‘brain’, or intelligent agent, for an information domain

It identifies, controls, manages, and relates concepts, and can act as a navigation tool and as a filter for search

It is one manifestation of an underlying conceptual model

Is everything miscellaneous?

Perhaps so, but information still needs managing, and some order must be placed upon the chaos

What does the process of constructing and maintaining a thesaurus teach us?

It teaches us to take a critical and analytical approach to the domain

It makes us think about • the nature of concepts• the form of their labels• their relationships

Ranganathan: three dimensions of information

• the ideas plane• the verbal plane• the notational plane

This view of information and its context takes us back to the foundations of information science

What's another word for thesaurus?Steven Wright

The terminology in information science and management may be used loosely, and there are fashions in the naming of tools. ‘Thesaurus’ was popular until the early 2000s when everything and anything was referred to as a ‘taxonomy’.Today, many owners of knowledge organization systems will call them ‘ontologies’ whether or not they possess the attributes of an ontology.

The new standard uses the phrase ‘structured vocabularies’ in preference to ‘thesauri’, perhaps indicating that the boundaries are less clear.

The combination of concepts, labels, and relationships underpins all types of organizational tools

Theory established for the thesaurus also holds for classifications, taxonomies and ontologies

There’s something fundamental about this approach to modelling information domains that should not be lightly abandoned

Despite some attempts at machine building of hierarchies, and talk of ‘the emergent thesaurus’ in folksonomy, these are not comparable with the rigour and logic of a properly constructed thesaurus

Particularly for semantic web applications, this careful examination of concepts, terms and relationships, and the use of logic, is vital to automatic reasoning

The principles and ideas underlying the thesaurus provide us with a theoretical underpinning for our professional practice.

This part of the professional curriculum may be the most intellectually challenging, and provide the most scope for research.

Without a scientific basis to the discipline we lack validity as a profession; we should be cautious about abandoning conceptual principles in favour of the solely pragmatic approach and a reactive attitude.

Rationalism:• logical• predictable• theory building• machine

compatible

vs.

Pragmatism:• reactive• localist• non-transferable

What's another word for thesaurus?

• controlled vocabulary• indexing tool• search tool• navigation tool• discovery tool• domain model

The thesaurus is vital to effective information work:• Because of the functions it performs• Because of the intellectual activities associated with

its creation• Because of the added value it gives to information