Does the traditional thesaurus have a place in modern information retrieval

: The introduction (1.0) of this article considers the status of the thesaurus within LIS and asks about the future prospect for thesauri. The main following points are: (2.0) Any knowledge organization system (KOS) is today threatened by Google-like systems, and it is therefore important to consider if there still is a need for knowledge organization (KO) in the traditional sense. (3.0) A thesaurus is a somewhat reduced form of KOS compared to, for example, an ontology, and its “bundling” and restricted number of semantic relations has never been justified theoretically or empirically. Which semantic relations are most fruitful for a given task is thus an open question, and different domains may need different kinds of KOS including different sets of relations between terms. (4.0) A KOS is a controlled vocabulary (CV) and should not be considered a “perfect language” (Eco 1995) that is simply able to remove the ambiguity of natural language; rather much ambiguity in language represents a battle between many “voices” (Bakhtin 1981) or “paradigms” (Kuhn 1962). In this perspective, a specific KOS, e.g. a specific thesaurus, is just one “voice” among many voices, and that voice has to demonstrate its authority and utility. It is concluded (5.0) that the traditional thesaurus does not have a place in modern information retrieval, but that more flexible semantic tools based on proper studies of domains will always be important.