ThesaurusStandards

ThesaurusStandards is an international framework and organization dedicated to establishing standardized practices for the design, maintenance, and interchange of thesauri and other controlled vocabularies. It provides a structured set of guidelines intended to improve interoperability across libraries, archives, publishers, and digital repositories by aligning terminology, relationships, and documentation methods.

Its core concepts cover term forms and relationships. ThesaurusStandards specifies preferred terms and approved non-preferred terms, as well as hierarchical relations such as broader and narrower terms, associative relations, and related terms. It also emphasizes scope notes, language variants, and the use of qualifiers to refine meanings. Data models recommended by the framework include concept schemes and statement records, with common encoding expressed through SKOS, RDF, and related XML representations to support machine readability and web interoperability.

Governance is provided by an international consortium drawn from libraries, archives, museums, scholarly publishing, and information technology groups. The organization publishes standards documents, best-practice guides, validation tools, and a conformance program intended to help institutions implement consistent thesaurus construction and evaluation.

Applications span cataloging, metadata creation, search indexing, and digital curation. ThesaurusStandards also promotes mappings between vocabularies, multilingual alignment, and interoperability across platforms. By aligning with broader standards such as SKOS, Dublin Core, and ISO library standards, the framework aims to facilitate data exchange and semantic search while supporting ongoing vocabulary maintenance and community feedback.

Related topics include thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and knowledge organization systems.