Page 116 - DLIS405_INFORMATION_STORAGE_AND_RETRIEVAL

Reena Kapoor, Lovely Professional University Unit 12: Vocabulary Control

Notes
Unit 12: Vocabulary Control

CONTENTS
Objectives

Introduction

12.1 Methodology
12.2 Library Science

12.3 Indexing Languages

12.4 Trends and Development
12.5 Summary

12.6 Keywords
12.7 Review Questions

12.8 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
• Define methodology and Library Science
• Explain indexing language
• Describe trends and development.

Introduction

Vocabulary control is used to improve the effectiveness of information storage and retrieval systems,
Web navigation systems, and other environments that seek to both identify and locate desired content
via some sort of description using language. The primary purpose of vocabulary control is to achieve
consistency in the description of content objects and to facilitate retrieval. Controlled vocabularies
provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval.
They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. Controlled
vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by
the designer of the vocabulary, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, where there is no
restriction on the vocabulary.
There are four important principles of vocabulary control that guide their design and development.
These are:
• eliminating ambiguity
• controlling synonyms
• establishing relationships among terms where appropriate
• testing and validation of terms.

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