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NISO Releases New Standard for Vocabulary Control

Goal of NISO Z39.19: A Better Path to Content Management

Bethesda, MD (USA) - November 17, 2005 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has released a revised controlled vocabularies standard, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. It is available free at the NISO website www.niso.org.
Vocabulary control improves information storage and retrieval systems, web navigation systems, and other environments used to identify and locate content via some sort of description-using language. ANSI/NISO Z39.19 shows how to formulate descriptors, establish relationships among terms, and present the information in print and on a screen.

Controlled vocabularies--lists, synonym rings, and taxonomies--are essential to manage large volumes of information. With a growing dependence on information databases in business and commerce, government, and education, there are thousands of controlled vocabularies in use.

The standard is a revision of NISO's thesaurus standard. When Z39.19 was first conceived, thesaurus terms were generally applied when indexing collections of printed documents such as articles and reports. The concept of "document" has since expanded to include patents, chemical structures, maps, music videos, and much more. This revision of the Z39.19 standard reflects the more inclusive notion of document. Features include:

  • User-friendly language and straightforward explanations of important concepts and principles.
  • Current uses of information technology, the various ways that people search or browse, and the many types of content they find.
  • Responses to needs presented by a variety of information producing organizations and different types of content; examples throughout the document are relevant to business and industry.

"As a provider of controlled vocabulary services and software, our consultants rely heavily on national and international standards to ensure that the solutions we develop with our clients are based on best practices and interoperability," said Simon Alterman, vice president, content, Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company. "Z39.19 embodies the distilled wisdom of the information industry. The fully updated and expanded 2005 version is an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with making information searchable and discoverable."

Addressing the practical value to users, Emily Gallup Fayen, vice president, Digital Content and Access for MuseGlobal, Inc., added "Although today's search engines do a wonderful job of coping with minor variations in terminology, controlled vocabularies help both those who are in the business of describing content and those who seek to find it. Using a controlled vocabulary for selecting terms promotes uniformity and accuracy. From the user standpoint, retrieval quality improves when the search terminology matches the controlled vocabulary used to describe the content."

About NISO

NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. NISO Standards, information about NISO's activities and membership are featured on the NISO website at http://www.niso.org.

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