Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri

Abstract

Multilingual indexing vocabularies exist in different forms, e.g. subject heading lists, thesauri, enumerative classifications, analytico-synthetic classifications. In a multilingual indexing vocabulary both the terms and the relationships are represented in more than one language.

In this document the emphasis is on multilingual thesauri. Since the drawing up of the Guidelines for the Establishment and Development of Multilingual Thesauri in the 1970s two developments have played important roles in the thinking about multilingual access to information: the building of nonsymmetrical thesauri and the linking of two or more thesauri and/or controlled vocabularies.