This paper endeavours to show the possibilities for thematic description of audio‐visual documents for television with the aim of promoting and facilitating information retrieval.
To achieve these goals different database fields are shown, as well as the way in which they are organised for indexing and thematic element description, analysed and used as an example. Some of the database fields are extracted from an analytical study of the documentary system of television in Spain. Others are being tested in university television on which indexing experiments are carried out.
Not all thematic descriptions are used on television information systems; nevertheless, some television channels do use thematic descriptions of both image and sound, applying thesauri. Moreover, it is possible to access sequences using full text retrieval as well.
The development of the documentary task, applying the described techniques, promotes thematic indexing and hence thematic retrieval. Given the fact that this is without doubt one of the aspects most demanded by television journalists (along with people's names). This conceptualisation translates into the adaptation of databases to new indexing methods.
