Glossary of Thesaurus Terminology
AUTHORITY CONTROL
The process of verifying and establishing a preferred form of a Proper Name or subject term for use in a standardized listing. A listing of names or terms that are governed by the standards of authority control are often referred to as an authority file or authority list and typically include cross-references, in order to ensure consistency in their usage.
BROADER TERM (BT)
A Broader Term is broader in scope than the terms that are subordinate to it in a thesaurus hierarchy and may have many Narrower Terms. A narrower term may itself be a broader term to even more specific terms in a Hierarchy.
CANDIDATE TERM
A term considered for inclusion in the thesaurus. Each new term proposed by users will be reviewed by the Ethnographic Thesaurus Review Board and a decision will be made as to whether the term will be accepted as a Preferred or Non-Preferred Term and added to the thesaurus.
CONTROLLED VOCABULARY
A regularized or standardized list of terms representing words drawn from natural language used to increase uniformity in indexing or information retrieval, and to enhance the sharing of information among institutions, individuals, and within and across disciplines. It includes subject headings, thesauri, and Taxonomies. The list is controlled by and is available from a controlled vocabulary registration authority which is also called Authority Control.
HIERARCHY
An arrangement of terms in a Thesaurus indicating broader, narrower, or related relationships. Hierarchical thesaurus arrangement is also referred to as taxonomic arrangement.
NARROWER TERM (NT)
A narrower term represents a more specific concept than its parent term in the thesaurus hierarchy, and is subordinate to another term or to multiple terms.
NON-PREFERRED TERM
A Non-Preferred Term is the non-preferred expression of a concept that refers the user to form of a term chosen as the Preferred Term in a thesaurus. Non-preferred terms are not always synonyms of the preferred term, but may be also quasi-synonyms, inversions of the preferred term, or subsumed terms that are too specific to be included in the thesaurus as preferred terms. In the online Ethnographic Thesaurus, non-preferred terms will appear in search results in italics. By clicking on the term in italics, the user is directed to the preferred term offered by the thesaurus.
POST-COORDINATED TERM
Post-coordinated terms are two or more simple thesaurus terms that are used together to form a complex term or concept.
PRE-COORDINATED TERM
Pre-coordinated terms are terms that combine two or more terms to create a Preferred Term that is a phrase in general use, such as: INTERNATIONAL FOLK DANCE or CULTIVATED VEGETATION AREAS.
PREFERRED TERM
The preferred form of a concept or term, as used in the thesaurus. Also referred to as a descriptor or index term.
PROPER NAME
Formal name of a unique entity, such as an individual, title, event, or place, which is often capitalized in English usage. With a few exceptions, the Ethnographic Thesaurus does not include proper names. Typical examples of proper names not included in the Ethnographic Thesaurus include personal names, associations, societies, institutions, business firms, nonprofit enterprises, governments, government agencies, conferences, festivals, meetings, geographic names, musical groups, named projects and programs, narrative types and motifs, or names of religions and religious groups, languages, national, ethnic, or cultural groups, diseases, holidays, song or book titles. In thesaurus usage, proper names or proper nouns are also referred to as identifiers.
QUALIFIER
A word or phrase in parentheses added following a term to indicate its context or specific meaning, such as: KALINDA (STICK DANCE)
RELATED TERM (RT)
A Preferred Term linked to another preferred term conceptually but not hierarchically.
SCOPE NOTE (SN)
A definition of a term and/or guidance on its use within the context of the thesaurus.
SUBJECT CATEGORY
A group or category of concepts, expressed as a cluster of Preferred and Non-Preferred Terms that share a single characteristic and provide the organizing principle in a thesaurus. Each subject category may have a number of characteristics, but only one is selected to collect and arrange the terms into a hierarchical order. Categories may be divided into sub-categories, when there are internal characteristics that identify subgroups of terms, such as the sub-category MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS included in the category MUSIC.
TAXONOMY
A taxonomy is a collection of Controlled Vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure. Each term in a taxonomy is in one or more parent/child (broader/narrower) relationships to other terms in the taxonomy.
THESAURUS
A thesaurus is a Controlled Vocabulary arranged in a known order and structured so that the various relationships-equivalence, homographic, hierarchical, and associative-among terms are displayed clearly and identified by standardized relationship indicators. A thesaurus is not a dictionary with definitions, though it may have Scope Notes that specify the parameters for use of a chosen term; nor is it a kind of synonym dictionary like Roget's Thesaurus or the MS Word thesaurus, with mere equivalences. The Ethnographic Thesaurus is, accordingly, a gathering of terms of relevance to the fields of ethnography, organized in clusters of terms, referred to as Facets to encompass a wide range of cultural subject areas.
TOP TERMS
The most general terms in a thesaurus hierarchy. In the Ethnographic Thesaurus, this means the most general term in a Subject Category, which is also used as the category name.
