To facilitate the retrieval of the mass of documents by subject and to optimize the visibility of the documents to search engines, the Library of Parliament’s Parliamentary Information and Research Service maintains an internal controlled vocabulary, the Library of Parliament Subject Taxonomy. Maintaining an impartial controlled vocabulary in a bilingual environment, where political sensitivities are involved, comes with challenges. Primary among them are the tasks of maintaining language neutrality and the interlinguistic equivalence of concepts between English and French.
To begin, the focus should be to ensure that the classification used in the taxonomy should treat groups equally. In addition, the choice of labels used must be impartial, as the label assigned to a concept influences the view expressed by the controlled vocabulary.
Furthermore, in a multilingual controlled vocabulary, an added interlinguistic equivalence relationship has to be dealt with adequately. Additionally, the relationship of a concept to other concepts may also differ from one language and culture to another language and culture. Hence, a multilingual controlled vocabulary must have a hierarchical and associative structure common to the languages of the communities it serves. In addition, care must be taken to ensure one language does not take precedence over another.
Consequently, the Library of Parliament’s Subject Taxonomy has been designed to represent the concepts and relational structures adequately. This is to avoid creating terms that are misunderstood by the speakers of one language and forcing a language into a relational and unrecognizable structure. Hence, the taxonomy is constructed or modified simultaneously in English and French. In addition, the knowledge of the analysts in the Library’s Parliamentary Information and Research Service are leveraged for determining terms for including in a hierarchy. Furthermore, the frequency with which indexers use terms and the strategies of the researchers are evaluated periodically to ensure the vocabulary remains relevant to the community it serves.
Some challenges in maintaining the Library of Parliament’s Subject Taxonomy are common to the creation of any controlled vocabulary. However, they are of particular importance in the context of the Library of Parliament. Hence, the least partisan vocabulary possible and an interlinguistic equivalence between English and French where neither language takes precedence over the other are used.
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