thesaurus: relevant content on this site

A thesaurus is a reference work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning (containing synonyms and sometimes antonyms), in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations. In Information Science, Library Science, and Information Technology, specialized thesauri are designed for information retrieval. They are a type of controlled vocabulary, for indexing or tagging purposes. Such a thesaurus can be used as the basis of an index for online material. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, for example, is used to index the Canadian Information retrieval thesauri are formally organized so that existing relationships between concepts are made explicit. As a result, they are more complex than simpler controlled vocabularies such as authority lists and synonym rings. Each term is placed in context, allowing a user to distinguish between "bureau" the office and "bureau" the furniture. Following international standards, they are generally arranged hierarchically by themes, topics or facets. Unlike a literary thesaurus, these specialized thesauri typically focus on one discipline, subject or field of study. In information technology, a thesaurus represents a database or list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Thesaurus)

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