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NZGLS thesauri - Criteria for new terms

Criteria for considering new thesaurus terms

After development of the initial set of terms, further terms were added based on user feedback and analysis of government portal searchlogs, keeping in mind the following criteria:

FONZ

  • Must be a function or activity
  • Must be a government function
  • Must relate to all-of-government, rather than being programme specific
  • Must cover central and local government
  • Must fit the New Zealand context
  • Must be permanent and enduring but take into account current usage
  • Must not conflict with, or cast confusion over, existing terms
  • Must be in English
  • Must fit into existing hierarchies

SONZ

  • Must be a subject, not including geographical, corporate, personal or programme names, or format types
  • Must reflect public-speak rather than government-speak
  • Must relate to all-of-government, rather than being programme specific
  • Must cover central and local government
  • Must fit the New Zealand context
  • Must be permanent and enduring but take into account current usage
  • Must not conflict with, or cast confusion over, existing terms
  • Must be in English - does not include Māori language terms, except in a few instances where there is no English equivalent in common usage, e.g. Kohanga reo
  • Must not duplicate FONZ, except in cases where an activity can be both a government function and the subject of another government function e.g. ‘Educating’ (FONZ) and ‘Education’ (SONZ) refer to the same activity but the SONZ term can be used as the subject of another government activity i.e. ‘Policy making’ about ‘Education’
  • Must be a demonstrated need on the portal for the term, to aid with retrieval either by clarifying ambiguity OR by dealing with volume of material on a topic
  • Must be general, rather than demonstrating specialised subject knowledge
  • Must be unambiguous
  • Must be useful in post-coordinate (see below) environment - terms will be combined to cover more specific/complex concepts, e.g. ‘Maori’ and ‘Health’ are combined to create the concept ‘Maori health’

Post-coordinate system: function and subject terms allocated to a record are not combined with one another, but remain independent. Terms are combined by the user as part of the search process; as opposed to pre-coordinate system, where: terms are combined by the indexer in a linear string as part of the metadata creation process.