Theoretical foundations of thesaurus‐construction and some methodological considerations for thesaurus‐updating
Chai Kim · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1973
Abstract It was argued that the present‐day thesaurus‐construction and maintenance rules and conventions are not theoretically based. For this redson, there are few rules and conventions for updating a thesaurus. Consequently, most of the thesauri adopted by operating information storage and retrieval systems are not systematically updated. In order to investigate how thesauri are actually updated, a survey was conducted. The working hypothesis was that the communication process between authors and readers is linear in nature (“one‐way” communication allowing no reciprocal feedback) if a thesaurus utilized in a system is not updated by both indexers and question negotiators. Findings show that thesauri viewed from the communications point of view do not allow a cybernetic process of communication (“both‐way” communication). The survey indicated that the present practice of updating thesauri is largely done by indexers alone. No attempt was made to develop a theory of thesaurus‐construction and updating. It was, however, argued that such a theory, if developed, should at least account for the concepts of meaning and knowledge. Within this theoretical framework, two techniques are suggested to be considered for the systematic updating of a thesaurus.