Write 4 page essay on the topic Literature.Download file to see previous pages... Therefore, a thesaurus is created so as to identify relationships between, as well as within the concepts. Hence, the

Write 4 page essay on the topic Literature.

Therefore, a thesaurus is created so as to identify relationships between, as well as within the concepts. Hence, the Library Association of Australia (1993) state that the leading purpose of Thesaurus is to assist in retrieving information. Other secondary purposes include assisting in offering definitions of terms, helping in understanding of new subject areas, and offering semantic maps by showing how concepts relate to each other. In addition, Thesaurus follows a set of internationally renowned standards, which give guidance on the structure and format of terms. These standards as stated by the Library Association of Australia (1993) include ISO 2788 and ANSI-NISO Z39. Thus, this aim of this paper is to review the development and nature of the APAIS Thesaurus, and examine its organizational structure and features. Also, this paper will evaluate the effectiveness of APAIS Thesaurus as a controlled vocabulary, as well as provide various examples to substantiate the points. The development and nature of APAIS Thesaurus According to National Library of Australia (2008), the APAIS thesaurus database was established in 1978 and lists the subject terms that are used to index articles for the APAIS, which is a subject guide to literature in both humanities and social sciences. In order to ease online searching, the National Library of Australia published the APAIS Thesaurus in 1980. Therefore, APAIS Thesaurus can be defined as a list of subject terms, which are used in the APAIS. However, apart from serving the clients of APAIS, the published Thesaurus has also been used in several wide projects that require a highly structured list of Australian subject terms like the proposal for its use as a subject indexing when using the Australian Government Locator Service (Monash University Library, 2012). The APAIS Thesaurus structure and features According to Miles, Rogers and Beckett (2001), there are two forms of thesauri structures: thesauri with non-standard structure and thesauri with a standard structure. Thesaurus with standard structure refers to any thesaurus that conforms to various structural restrictions. It consists of a set of terms, term annotations, and term to term relationships among others. Thesaurus with non-standard structure refers to any thesaurus with certain structural features that are not defined by ISO 2788:1986. APAIS Thesaurus has a standard structure, which is similar to that of the Canadian Thesaurus. The APAIS Thesaurus contains only terms with the relations UF USE BT NT RT between them, which means that it can be drawn into the SKOS-Core 1.0 schema without losing any data. The following table shows the reference structure, which is used to connect terms in APAIS Thesaurus (Miles, Rogers and Beckett, 2001). Reference Abbrev. Meaning USE This shows the preferred subject Note It indicates the application of descriptors, or their meaning USED FOR UF Shows terms that are not preferred BROADER TERM BF Shows the class name where the subject is a member NAROWER TERM NT Shows members of the class that is represented by the subject RELATED TERM RT Shows concepts that are associated with the subject, but do not relate to a class membership (Miles, Rogers and Beckett, 2001). In the structural arrangement of APAIS, each issue consists of three sections.