- Course overview
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- What is bioinformatics?
- The role of public databases
- Managing and sharing data
- Bioinformatics as an experimental science
- Summary
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- References
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Thesaurus
In the field of information retrieval, a thesaurus is defined as a controlled and structured vocabulary in which concepts are represented by terms. Terms are organised so that relationships between concepts are made explicit. Preferred terms are accompanied by lead-in entries for synonyms or quasi-synonyms (see the relevant international standard). One example of a thesaurus that you might have come across is MeSH, the US National Library of Medicine’s thesaurus of Medical Subject Headings (Figure 8). If you are interested, the NLM provides a series of tutorials about MeSH.
The primary advantage of a thesaurus compared with a non-hierarchical list is that, if the synonyms are well defined, the user can find information without using the exact terminology used by the person who created the database record.
