Theoretical foundations of thesaurus‐construction and some methodological considerations for thesaurus‐updating

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.