ThesaurusManagement

ThesaurusManagement encompasses processes and software that create, maintain, and govern a thesaurus, a structured vocabulary used to tag content, support retrieval, and enable semantic search. A thesaurus encodes terms (preferred and non-preferred) and relationships such as broader, narrower, related, and equivalence relations, with notes describing scope, usage, and applicability. Multilingual labels, synonyms, and historical forms may be included to support localization and historical analysis.

Core components include a term store, a relationship graph, and a metadata schema, plus versioning, change history, governance mechanisms, and workflow support for reviews and approvals. Localization capabilities and access control are common requirements. Data models often align with SKOS-like structures, where terms are nodes and relationships are edges, and where import/export in standard formats is supported. Systems typically offer APIs and integration with search, tagging, and analytics workflows.

Typical workflows cover term creation, review, approval, publishing, and retired terms with deprecation processes. Audit trails and role-based permissions support accountability and compliance with governance policies.

Interoperability and standards: ISO 25964 and SKOS provide guidance for interoperability, while mappings to ontologies and other vocabularies enable cross-domain alignment and semantic harmonization.

Applications and benefits: ThesaurusManagement supports libraries, digital repositories, enterprise search, content management, and e-commerce by improving precision, enabling faceted navigation, and facilitating consistent tagging.

Related concepts include controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies, metadata, and search optimization.