Irish Public Service Thesaurus

"The Public Service Thesaurus (PST) has been developed as a list of descriptors, or controlled vocabulary, by which public sector resources may be indexed. It was developed to facilitate public sector compliance with the Irish Public Service Metadata Standard (IPSMS), and in so doing to enhance the capacity of public sector organisaitons to make their resources accessible and visible to their client base.

Compliance can be achieved by using appropriate terms from the vocabulary in conjunction with the mandatory DC.Subject element.

The structure of the PST is such as to ensure ease of navigation around the vocabulary. It is represented at the top level by fourteen separate categories based on the wide areas of interest and involvement of public sector organisations. These top-level cateogries subdivide into second-level categories and so forth, each level in turn listing more specific subject sub-divisions.

Many terms in the PST have been posted upwards in order to 1) limit the number of terms available for indexing, and consequently keep the thesaurus to a manageable size, and 2) to ensure as far as is practicable that resources sharing a common theme are returned together. This implies that the degree of specificity of terms available as indexing terms has been restricted. The PST, as an information retrieval thesaurus, is largely concerned with grouping like subject matter together, rather than allowing the naming of a particular object to the exclusion of others. In summary, a (preferred) term should be general enough that it might be used to index a number of items."