Controlled vocabulary
A controlled vocabulary is a collection of terms ( vocabulary ) that are clearly assigned to terms so that no homonyms occur. In many cases, the opposite direction also applies (each term has only one or one preferred term, i.e. there are no synonyms ).
Controlled vocabularies appear, for example, as indexes of technical terms or glossaries in which terms are clearly defined. Within the same language, controlled vocabularies are particularly important in documentation science, since information is clearly described there using key words ( indexing ). In addition, they are indispensable between several languages wherever uniform word meanings across languages are important, for example in medicine (example: ICD-10 ).
The catchphrase, which comes from a controlled vocabulary, is also called a descriptor . The controlled keywords are managed in a thesaurus or an authority file .
In computer science in particular , identifiers are used to uniquely identify objects . Since the keywording of resources on the Internet is not done in a controlled manner, a semantic assignment to terms should take place in the semantic web using RDF via URIs . Some types of reference books also contain controlled vocabularies; For example, it must be decided whether an article about passenger cars should be called “Wagen”, “Auto” or “PKW”.
Examples
- The subject headings authority file is used in libraries in German-speaking countries for subject indexing .
- The EU uses IATE as a controlled vocabulary.
- The Medical Subject Headings are used for the MEDLINE bibliographic database .
- The ICD-10 of the World Health Organization is the most important diagnostic classification system of medicine. It is recognized and translated worldwide.
- The wiki glossary of evaluation with over 400 consolidated terms (definition German; terms in three languages).
See also
literature
- Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies . ANSI / NISO Z39.19-2005. 2005, ISBN 1-880124-65-3 ( online ).