5.3 Types of Displays

5.3.1 Alphabetical Displays (9.3.1)

5.3.1.1 Alphabetical Listing (9.3.1.1)

An alphabetical listing is the most basic type of vocabulary display. It should contain both terms and entry terms with USE references. In the machine-readable controlled vocabulary, spelling variations, common misspellings, and common typographical errors may be stored as USE references to enhance retrieval, but need not be displayed to users. Controlled vocabularies linked to databases sometimes display the number of postings for assigned terms. The postings data in a controlled vocabulary display should not include the occurrences in the full text that match terms from the controlled vocabulary.

Example 145: Alphabetical listing display

Source: Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors

5.3.1.2 Flat Format Displays

The flat format is the most commonly used controlled vocabulary display format. It consists of all the terms arranged in alphabetical order, including their term details, and one level of BT/NT hierarchy.
In some computer systems, each term in a hierarchical display is assigned a line number, which the user can reference in expanding a search. Node labels may also be assigned line numbers so they can be used to facilitate including narrower terms in a search strategy.

NOTE: A flat format display can also be considered a type of hierarchical display. See section 5.3.4 for additional hierarchical displays.

Example 146: Flat format display

Source: Thomson Gale Master Thesaurus, Synaptica® software by Synapse Corporation

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Source: Based on ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 ISBN: 1-880124-65-3
Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies