The INIS Thesaurus: historical perspective

The INIS Thesaurus is a controlled terminological knowledge base that has been developed over the years through the contribution of INIS Member States in all areas of peaceful applications of nuclear science and technology, which is also the subject scope of the INIS Collection. The thesaurus is primarily used for subject indexing of input into the INIS system and for retrieval of information from the database. Thanks to the vital support of INIS Member States, the thesaurus has been translated into eight languages (i.e. all IAEA official languages plus German and Japanese) and is available online to assist our global users as a tool for retrieval and for general reference. It is a dynamic information resource that is continually updated to cater to new developments of terminologies in nuclear science and technology. Since its inception in the 1960's, it was decided that the subject analysis for INIS input preparation be based on its own subject categories, which also determines its scope, and keyword indexing using a thesaurus. This article briefly describes the development of the INIS Thesaurus from a historical perspective