[sigCR] How many controlled vocabularies?

[Joseph Tennis]

Friends and colleagues,

I am wondering if anyone knows how many controlled vocabularies exist in the world today?  I am aware of the OBO Foundry, Taxobank, and I have started to collect lists from other places, but I don't have a clue as to whether these are a representative sample or not.  I can only start to understand if I know how many are out there (in every different version).  Does anyone have an idea?  Does anyone know where I might look?  Does the SAS collection at Toronto serve as a complete inventory of these things?

And by controlled vocabulary I mean classification schemes, thesauri, terminologies, ontologies, etc.  Anything that is a restricted set of semantics used in the process of indexing or labeling.  Yes, that is very general ;-)

Thanks for any and all help you can provide.

Sincerely,
joe



Joseph T. Tennis
Assistant Professor
The Information School
University of Washington

Reviews Editor for the journal Knowledge Organization

jtennis at uw.edu<mailto:jtennis at uw.edu>
http://ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/jtennis