The Information Retrieval Thesaurus

In the post-war period before computers were readily available, urgent demand for scientific and industrial development stimulated research and development (R&D) that led to the birth of the information retrieval thesaurus. This article traces the early history, speciation and progressive improvement of the thesaurus to reach the state now conveyed by guidelines in international and national standards. Despite doubts about the effectiveness of the thesaurus throughout this period, and notwithstanding the dominance of Google and other search engines in the information retrieval (IR) scene today, the thesaurus still plays a complementary part in the organization of knowledge and information resources. Success today depends on interoperability, and is opening up opportunities in linked data applications. At the same time, the IR demand from workers in the knowledge society drives interest in hybrid forms of knowledge organization system (KOS) that may pool the genes of thesauri with those of ontologies and classification schemes.