7. What and who is the thesaurus for?

The thesaurus was conceived in a context of rapid development of new disciplines and new types of documentary collections, the modeling of new approaches to information use, and the increasingly imposing presence of computing in documentary environments. The thesaurus, whose role was originally to ensure consistency in the representation of concepts and to facilitate the task of the information seeker, became a useful component of information systems in the second half of the 20th century.

The essential functions of the thesaurus are :

• make information and document retrieval easier and more efficient;

• allow for exhaustive retrieval by linking concepts and terms with similar meanings;

• reduce the difficulties of representation and retrieval caused by...