The Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus is a bilingual thesaurus consisting of terminology which represents all the fields treated in information resources of the Government of Canada. It contains 4,983 terms in English and 5,050 in French, including 2,294 preferred terms in English and 2,294 in French. All fields of knowledge are represented in the thesaurus, to varying degrees. Because of the great variety of subjects covered by the thesaurus, its terminology is rather general. By design, it does not include specialized terminology used in specific and limited disciplines.
The tool is primarily intended for content managers, librarians, indexers and metadata developers in federal departments and agencies who must select controlled subject terms to index Government of Canada Web resources. In the Treasury Board Standard on Metadata, the Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus is identified as the preferred source of controlled vocabulary for that purpose. Using the CST will help to reduce the duplication of effort in creating a variety of controlled vocabularies in the Government of Canada, as well as increase the interoperability of government web sites.
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Technical notes
The Government of Canada Core Subject Thesaurus was developed in accordance with the Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri (ISO 2788-1986) and the Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri (ISO 5964-1985).