The compliance of Hungarian thesauri with international standardsThe complíance of Hungárián thesauri with international standards

Abstract

The characteristics of mono- and multilingual thesauri including those under preparation have been compared to the requirements of international standards and guidelines. Their formats comply more or less with the international rules, however, in their contents considerable differences have been observed. The constraints concerning the parts of speech are minimum: adjectives are quite often used as individual deseriptors. More relations between lexical units are differentiated than recommended by the standards. Particularly striking is the role of AND- and OR relations between non-deseriptors and deseriptors; the international decuments do not refer to these relations at all. The most significant deviations from the standards and guidelines exist in thesauri used for machine-readable bibliographic data-bases: the computer programs affect considerably the structure of the thesauri. Standardization activities have neglected this fact, though the influence of automation should have a more pronounced role in standardization than the present practkes.