establishing order, integrity, consistency, and accuracy in thesauri as information storage and retrieval systems plays an important role in the organization of information. the deployment of universally accepted standards, therefore, facilitates the accomplishment of this goal. to achieve this goal, the ansi /niso z 39.19 -2005 standard offers certain rules and principles for constructing cont...

For the foreseeable future, controlled medical vocabularies will be in a constant state of development, expansion and refinement. Changes in controlled vocabularies must be reconciled with historical patient information which is coded using those vocabularies and stored in clinical databases. This paper explores the kinds of changes that can occur in controlled vocabularies, including adding te...

A major problem that arises in many large application domains is the discrepancy among terminologies of diierent information systems. The terms used by the information systems of one organization may not agree with the terms used by another organization even when they are in the same domain. Such a situation clearly impedes communication and the sharing of information, and decreases the eecienc...

Language is the chief embodiment of information and it is, therefore, not surprising that in the information age, a new importance should attach to language. The 1980s have been called ‘‘the decade of language.’’ Worldwide the present publication of language tools, such as dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri, is proceeding at the rate of 500 per month and there now exist over 10,000 vocabula...