Controlled vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri,taxonomies and other forms of knowledge organization systems. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.

In library and information science controlled vocabulary is a carefully selected list of words and phrases, which are used to tag units of information (document or work) so that they may be more easily retrieved by a search. Controlled vocabularies solve the problems of homographs, synonyms and polysemes by a bijection between concepts and authorized terms. In short, controlled vocabularies reduce ambiguity inherent in normal human languages where the same concept can be given different names and ensure consistency.

For example, in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (a subject heading system that uses a controlled vocabulary), authorized terms—subject headings in this case—have to be chosen to handle choices between variant spellings of the same word (American versus British), choice among scientific and popular terms (cockroach versus Periplaneta americana), and choices between synonyms (automobile versus car), among other difficult issues.

Choices of authorized terms are based on the principles of user warrant (what terms users are likely to use), literary warrant (what terms are generally used in the literature and documents), and structural warrant (terms chosen by considering the structure, scope of the controlled vocabulary).

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