Australian Government Subjects
TAGS – Thesaurus of Australian Government Subjects
This Thesaurus was developed as a result of a Project known as the Australian Whole of
Government High Level Subject Thesaurus Project, sponsored by the National Office for the
Information Economy (NOIE).
The purpose of the Project was to develop a high level thesaurus of subject terms for use by
Government agencies, which all agencies may use in the AGLS Subject element to describe their resources. AGLS Metadata facilitates discovery and use of an agency's resources online.
Subject metadata chosen from a controlled vocabulary such as this Thesaurus increases the ease and precision with which information is located.
TAGS - Thesaurus of Australian Government Subjects was compiled …show more content…
The thesaurus conforms with ANSI/NISO Z39.19, Guidelines for the construction, format and management of monolingual thesauri - the standard for structure and organization of information retrieval thesauri.
Compiling the TAGS Thesaurus
TAGS presents the business of government from a subject or topic perspective, and is independent of the structure of government. The Thesaurus represents concepts in a neutral way, and covers all general areas of interest to government.
Following an initial review of candidate thesauri, the Canadian Whole of Government Subject
Thesaurus1 was chosen as the base list for the draft Australian Thesaurus. No single Australian subject thesaurus covered the range of relevant subject matter at an appropriate high level. The
Canadian Thesaurus was found to cover a wide range of topics relevant to Australian
Commonwealth government interests, hierarchical and reference relationships were already established in accordance with ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (a requirement of the Project), and it featured a useful classification of terms into broad subject categories independent of the hierarchical arrangement.
The Project commenced with discussions between the consultant and representatives of …show more content…
It does use the phrase in nonpreferredterms, e.g., ‘Occupational health and safetycommittees USE Health and safety committees’.
A balance between the need for the Thesaurus to be ‘high level’ whilst at the same time being
‘detailed enough to be useful’ for metadata authors and searchers was also sought.
Not all topics are covered to the same level of detail in TAGS, and subject matter unrelated to the business of government is excluded. The most detailed coverage is given to topics where no appropriate subject thesaurus already exists. In some cases detail is included selectively, for example the terms ‘Wool’ and Cotton’ are included but ‘Mohair’ is not. The hierarchical structure allows additional terms to be included later if necessary.
For subject areas where agencies already use an established subject thesaurus, such as health and agriculture, the TAGS terminology has been deliberately kept at a very high level. In
This Thesaurus was developed as a result of a Project known as the Australian Whole of
Government High Level Subject Thesaurus Project, sponsored by the National Office for the
Information Economy (NOIE).
The purpose of the Project was to develop a high level thesaurus of subject terms for use by
Government agencies, which all agencies may use in the AGLS Subject element to describe their resources. AGLS Metadata facilitates discovery and use of an agency's resources online.
Subject metadata chosen from a controlled vocabulary such as this Thesaurus increases the ease and precision with which information is located.
TAGS - Thesaurus of Australian Government Subjects was compiled …show more content…
The thesaurus conforms with ANSI/NISO Z39.19, Guidelines for the construction, format and management of monolingual thesauri - the standard for structure and organization of information retrieval thesauri.
Compiling the TAGS Thesaurus
TAGS presents the business of government from a subject or topic perspective, and is independent of the structure of government. The Thesaurus represents concepts in a neutral way, and covers all general areas of interest to government.
Following an initial review of candidate thesauri, the Canadian Whole of Government Subject
Thesaurus1 was chosen as the base list for the draft Australian Thesaurus. No single Australian subject thesaurus covered the range of relevant subject matter at an appropriate high level. The
Canadian Thesaurus was found to cover a wide range of topics relevant to Australian
Commonwealth government interests, hierarchical and reference relationships were already established in accordance with ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (a requirement of the Project), and it featured a useful classification of terms into broad subject categories independent of the hierarchical arrangement.
The Project commenced with discussions between the consultant and representatives of …show more content…
It does use the phrase in nonpreferredterms, e.g., ‘Occupational health and safetycommittees USE Health and safety committees’.
A balance between the need for the Thesaurus to be ‘high level’ whilst at the same time being
‘detailed enough to be useful’ for metadata authors and searchers was also sought.
Not all topics are covered to the same level of detail in TAGS, and subject matter unrelated to the business of government is excluded. The most detailed coverage is given to topics where no appropriate subject thesaurus already exists. In some cases detail is included selectively, for example the terms ‘Wool’ and Cotton’ are included but ‘Mohair’ is not. The hierarchical structure allows additional terms to be included later if necessary.
For subject areas where agencies already use an established subject thesaurus, such as health and agriculture, the TAGS terminology has been deliberately kept at a very high level. In