Analogues to much of today's work in ontologies have existed for centuries in text retrieval. The use of controlled vocabularies, or thesauri, has been fundamental to document indexing in library science. Thesauri serve several purposes, including:

[bull] Knowledge organisation A thesaurus provides a hierarchy of concepts that organises domain-specific knowledge.

[bull] Terminology normalisation By selecting a unique word or phrase to represent each domain concept, then linking synonymous terms to it, a thesaurus enforces terminological consistency.

[bull] Query expansion A thesaurus facilitates the addition of terms to a query by providing explicit hierarchical and lateral relationships among terms.

These properties serve to mediate the information flow from indexer to user. Thesauri thus serve manyof the same functions for people that ontologies are designed to serve for software agents. Asautomated retrieval has developed over the decades since the inception of computer processing of text,many techniques have been introduced to apply this typically manual work to the automated arena (seeSoergel (1985) for an introduction to library information systems, also Anderson and Pélrez-Carballo(2001a, 2001b) for a summary of the intersection of human and machine indexing).