Vocabulary / Thesaurus
A structured set of terms broader than a simple encoding scheme
24 standards
AGROVOC
Over 42,000 concepts spanning agriculture, fisheries, and food science in more than 42 languages.
Art & Architecture Thesaurus
(AAT)A multilingual thesaurus of over 55,000 concepts for art, architecture, and material culture.
Cellosaurus
A comprehensive knowledge resource on cell lines, covering nomenclature, cross-references, and provenance.
Contributor Roles Taxonomy
(CRediT)A taxonomy of fourteen roles capturing how each contributor participated in scholarly research.
EIGE Gender Equality Glossary and Thesaurus
Over 400 multilingual terms defining gender equality concepts for EU policy and research indexing.
European Language Social Science Thesaurus
(ELSST)A multilingual thesaurus of 3,400 social science concepts in 15 European languages.
European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations
(ESCO)Maps 3,000 occupations and 13,000 skills across 28 languages for the European labour market.
EuroVoc
(EuroVoc)Multilingual thesaurus covering all EU policy areas in 24 official languages and beyond.
Faceted Application of Subject Terminology
(FAST)Breaks complex library subject headings into simple facets for easier cataloging and web use.
FISH Terminologies
(FISH)A suite of over 20 thesauri for recording archaeological and built heritage in the British Isles.
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
(TGN)Over 2.2 million place names with coordinates and hierarchies for cultural heritage cataloging.
Homosaurus
An international linked data vocabulary of LGBTQ+ terms for libraries, archives, and museums.
Inspec Thesaurus
A controlled vocabulary for indexing physics, engineering, and computing literature with precision.
IPTC NewsCodes
Multilingual controlled vocabularies for classifying news content by subject, genre, and role.
Library of Congress Name Authority File
(LCNAF)Over eight million authority records for the names of persons, organizations, and titles.
Library of Congress Subject Headings
(LCSH)The world's largest general-purpose subject heading system, maintained continuously since 1898.
Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes
(LOINC)Universal codes for identifying laboratory tests, clinical observations, and survey instruments.
Medical Subject Headings
(MeSH)A hierarchical thesaurus of 30,000 descriptors for indexing biomedical literature in PubMed.
NCBI Taxonomy Database
The authoritative classification of over 2.5 million organisms across all NCBI sequence databases.
SNOMED Clinical Terms
(SNOMED CT)The world's most comprehensive clinical terminology, coding over 350,000 medical concepts.
Thesaurus for Graphic Materials
(TGM)A controlled vocabulary for indexing photographs, prints, and other pictorial materials by subject.
UNESCO Thesaurus
A multilingual subject vocabulary spanning education, culture, and science in five languages.
Union List of Artist Names
(ULAN)An authority file of 300,000 artist and architect names maintained by the Getty Research Institute.
Virtual International Authority File
(VIAF)Links name authority records from national libraries worldwide into shared, persistent identifier clusters.
