AN INVESTIGATION OF THE NATURE OF THE RELATION BETWEEN TERMS IN THESAURI

The nature of the affinitive relationships expressed through thesaural related terms has been studied in ten thesauri, of which eight were examined in detail. The relationships have been analyzed in terms of Farradane's relational indexing ‘operators’ and the four fundamental categories of concepts derived by the Classification Research Group in England. The results are tabulated to show the numbers of different categories of descriptors, category pairs, and descriptor/related‐term pairs; the relative occurrences of category pairs and of the different relational operators are shown in histograms. The results are considered in detail and show that there is no consistent pattern of relations in use. Problems in improving the nature and selection of related terms in thesauri are discussed.