Abstract
Relationships between the terms in thesauri and indexes are the subject of national and international standards. The standards for thesauri enumerate and provide criteria for three basic types of relationship: equivalence, hierarchical, and associative. Standards and guidelines for indexes draw on the thesaurus standards to provide less detailed guidance for showing relationships between the terms used in an index. The international standard for multilingual thesauri adds recommendations for assuring equal treatment of the languages of a thesaurus. The present standards were developed when lookup and search were essentially manual, and the value of the kinds of relationships has never been determined. It is not clear whether users understand or can use the distinctions between kinds of relationships. On the other hand, sophisticated text analysis systems may be able both to assist with development of more powerful term relationship schemes and to use the relationships to improve retrieval.
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Milstead, J.L. (2001). Standards for Relationships between Subject Indexing Terms. In: Bean, C.A., Green, R. (eds) Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. Information Science and Knowledge Management, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9696-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9696-1_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5652-8
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