Systems Thesaurus Technical Committee

The IEEE Systems Council participates in the update of IEEE Thesaurus via appointing a representative for a three-year assignment to the IEEE Thesaurus Board. This assignment is renewable once for another three-year appointment. This representative meets proactively, with representatives from other societies, to ensure that the IEEE Thesaurus document is updated regularly. New terms are also added periodically as technology progresses over time. This document has a controlled vocabulary of about 11,100 descriptive engineering, technical, and scientific terms, as well as IEEE-specific society terms. It represents terminology and vocabulary usage drawn from IEEE transactions and journal articles, periodicals, conference papers, standards, and other publications that are made available on IEEE Xplore®, and it provides a common and consistent language for authors, researchers, and online discovery. It is also a tool to improve and enhance the indexing and retrieval of information, and it provides a common and consistent language for authors, researchers, and online discovery.

The vocabulary uses American-based spellings with cross references to British variant spellings.  The IEEE Thesaurus contains controlled vocabulary referred to as descriptors or preferred terms. These descriptors are considered the preferred terms for index usage.  Construction of the Thesaurus is based on the ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (R2010) standard, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies.  In this standard, Sections 5 through 8 contain detailed information on controlled vocabularies, display formats, usage, spelling, and selection criteria for descriptors. If you wish to download the PDF of the current IEEE Thesaurus, please check out the Thesaurus Access page and review the Creative Commons License and user conditions.

The present Representative of the IEEE Systems Council is Steve Holt, who is also the IEEE Systems Council VP of Technical Operations, as well as the Chair of the Ad Hoc Education Committee. He is currently in his second and final three-year appointment term as the Representative to the IEEE Thesaurus Board.