Wherever there have been large collections of information, whether on paper or in computers, scholars have faced a challenge in pinpointing the items they seek. The use of classification schemes to arrange the documents in order was only a partial solution. Another approach was to index the contents of the documents using words or terms, rather than classification codes. In the 1940s and 1950s some pioneers, such as
Calvin Mooers, Charles L. Bernier, Evan J. Crane and
Hans Peter Luhn, collected up their index terms in various kinds of list that they called a “thesaurus” (by analogy with the well known thesaurus developed by
Peter Roget). The first such list put seriously to use in information retrieval was the thesaurus developed in 1959 at the E I Dupont de Nemours Company. The first two of these lists to be published were the
Thesaurus of ASTIA Descriptors (1960) and the
Chemical Engineering Thesaurus of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (1961), a descendant of the Dupont thesaurus. More followed, culminating in the influential
Thesaurus of Engineering and Scientific Terms (TEST) published jointly by the Engineers Joint Council and the US Department of Defense in 1967. TEST did more than just serve as an example; its Appendix 1 presented
Thesaurus rules and conventions that have guided thesaurus construction ever since. Hundreds of thesauri have been produced since then, perhaps thousands. The most notable innovations since TEST have been: (a) Extension from monolingual to multilingual capability; and (b) Addition of a conceptually organized display to the basic alphabetical presentation. Here we mention only some of the national and international standards that have built steadily on the basic rules set out in TEST: •
UNESCO Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri. 1970 (followed by later editions in 1971 and 1981) • DIN 1463
Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri. 1972 (followed by later editions) • ISO 2788
Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri. 1974 (revised 1986) • ANSI
American National Standard for Thesaurus Structure, Construction, and Use. 1974 (revised 1980 and superseded by ANSI/NISO Z39.19-1993) • ISO 5964
Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri. 1985 • ANSI/NISO Z39.19
Guidelines for the construction, format, and management of monolingual thesauri. 1993 (revised 2005 and renamed
Guidelines for the construction, format, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies.) • ISO 25964
Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies. Part 1 (
Thesauri for information retrieval) published 2011; Part 2 (
Interoperability with other vocabularies) published 2013. The most clearly visible trend across this history of thesaurus development has been from the context of small-scale isolation to a networked world. Access to information was notably enhanced when thesauri crossed the divide between monolingual and multilingual applications. More recently, as can be seen from the titles of the latest ISO and NISO standards, there is a recognition that thesauri need to work in harness with other forms of vocabulary or knowledge organization system, such as subject heading schemes, classification schemes, taxonomies and ontologies. The official website for ISO 25964 gives more information, including a reading list. == Purpose ==