Objectives

Purpose of the Thesaurus

A thesaurus is a structured list of expressions intended to represent in unambiguous fashion the conceptual content of the documents in a documentary system and the queries addressed to that system.

In natural language, a concept can be represented by a number of equivalent expressions (for example, agro-industry and agri-foodstuffs industry or processing of agricultural products and agricultural product processing industry).

The role of the thesaurus is to monitor vocabulary, ensuring that each concept is represented by a preferred term or descriptor. The meaning of the descriptor is clarified by the links between terms in the thesaurus.

Synonyms or equivalent terms, called non-descriptors, are never allocated as indexing terms, but instead direct users to the appropriate descriptor.

PURPOSE OF EUROVOC

Eurovoc is a multilingual thesaurus which was originally built up specifically for processing the documentary information of the EU institutions.

It is a multi-disciplinary thesaurus covering fields which are sufficiently wide-ranging to encompass both Community and national points of view, with a certain emphasis on parliamentary activities. Eurovoc is a controlled set of vocabulary which can be used outside the EU institutions, particularly by parliaments.

The aim of the thesaurus is to provide the information management and dissemination services with a coherent indexing tool for the effective management of their documentary resources and to enable users to carry out documentary searches using controlled vocabulary.

ADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS

(a)  Advantages

Using the thesaurus has the following advantages:

— terminological standardisation of indexing vocabularies, allowing more accurate documentary searches;

— multilingualism: establishing language equivalences between identical concepts expressed in different languages allows documents to be indexed in the language of the documentalist and searches to be made in the user’s language;

— exchange of bibliographic records between documentary services using the Eurovoc thesaurus.

(b)  Limitations

However, Eurovoc has limitations.

— Eurovoc has been designed to meet the needs of systems of general documentation on the activities of the European Union; it is not suitable for indexing and searching for specialised documents;

— Eurovoc cannot claim to cover the various national situations at a sufficiently detailed level; however, efforts are being made to take account of the needs of users outside the EU institutions.