United Nations Bibliographical Information System Thesaurus

"The multilingual UNBIS Thesaurus contains the terminology used in subject analysis of documents and other materials relevant to United Nations programmes and activities. It is multidisciplinary in scope, reflecting the Organization’s wide-ranging concerns. The terms included are meant to reflect accurately, clearly, concisely and with a sufficient degree of specificity, matters of importance and interest to the United Nations. In addition, since the inception of the Thesaurus in 1981, two primary criteria in the selection of descriptors have been: a) consistency with the terminology used by the Organization itself as reflected in its documents; and b) compatibility with terms included in thesauri produced or utilized within the UN System, in order to facilitate exchange of information with other organizations. The organizations of the United Nations System, such as the World Bank, ILO, WHO, FAO, IAEA and Unesco, are lead agencies in their particular areas of activity and their choice of descriptors has been preferred.

It is used as the subject authority of the United Nations Bibliographic Information System (UNBIS) and has been incorporated as the subject lexicon of the United Nations Official Document System."