ABSTRACT
The relevant standard here is ISO 5964:1985: Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri (International, 1985a), the equivalent to British Standard 6723:1985 (British, 1985a), which states clearly right at the start: The guidelines given in this International Standard should be used in conjunction with ISO 2788, and regarded as an extension of the scope of the monolingual guidelines. It is considered that the majority of procedure and recommendations contained in ISO 2788 are equally valid for a multilingual thesaurus’. This can be seen to be sound advice when it is considered that the majority of descriptors are nouns (see D3.1.1) and, more importantly, that thesaurus compilation is concerned with the identification of the concepts behind the words.
