Outlook

The value of imposing a certain level of semantic and terminological control on natural language is recognized by both producers and users of contemporary information systems. The documentary thesaurus is an instrument whose usefulness is no longer in doubt, even in the presence of search engines capable of manipulating language fairly efficiently. A thesaurus is a reliable, predictable and stable system for organizing and representing knowledge and information. The availability of a logically structured and regularly updated thesaurus contributes to a marked improvement in the accuracy, coherence and quality of both subject representation and information retrieval results.

Disciplinary and corporate thesauri are considered to be more effective than encyclopedic languages as a tool for information retrieval, because they enable highly specialized representation...