controlevocabulaire

Controlevocabulaire is a term used in information science to denote the practice and systems for controlling vocabulary used to describe, index, and retrieve information. It encompasses the development, maintenance, and application of standardized terms and relationships to ensure consistent indexing and retrieval across catalogs, databases, and digital repositories. In French discourse, it is often expressed as contrôle du vocabulaire or référentiel terminologique and is closely related to authority files and thesauri.

Core concepts include the selection of authorized terms, the creation of relationships between terms (broader, narrower, related), and the management of multilingual equivalences. The main components are authority files (fichiers d'autorité), thesauri (thésaurus), subject headings, and ontologies or taxonomies. These resources are designed to standardize labels for topics, practices, or objects, reducing synonymy, polysemy, and inconsistency.

Applications: in libraries, archives, and museums to index catalog records; in digital libraries and content management systems; in metadata standards such as MARC, Dublin Core, and increasingly JSON-LD vocabularies. Controlled vocabularies support precise search, faceted navigation, and data interoperability across systems and languages. They also enable machine reasoning and improved indexing by automated tools.

Advantages include improved search accuracy, consistent tagging, multilingual alignment, and better data integration. Challenges comprise ongoing maintenance, scope definition, resource costs, and keeping pace with emerging terminology. With the rise of AI, controlevocabulaire is often integrated with natural language processing to map user queries to standardized terms.