Descriptor

Descriptor in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Descriptor in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Descriptor may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. The term descriptor is usually reserved for a term that is part of a controlled indexing language. Such indexing languages are often listed in a thesaurus. For each concept included in the indexing language, one descriptor will be chosen to represent the concept, and all other terms that can be used for the same concept are linked to the descriptor by means of cross references. Thus, if a thesaurus uses the descriptor lawyer, then it might not use the terms attorney, barrister, solicitor, or counselor-at-law. Each of these alternative terms would be linked to the preferred descriptor lawyer and would be given the status of un-used synonymous or equivalent terms. (Equivalent terms are terms that are not truly synonymous, but are close enough so that they can be considered equivalent in the context of an Information Retrieval database. Anyone who knows the English legal system knows that barrister and solicitor are not exactly the same as U.S. lawyers, but in many databases, the distinction would not be important enough to make, so that barrister and solicitor could be considered equivalent to lawyer.) See also vocabulary control/vocabulary management.

Descriptors in Law Libraries

The follow definition of Descriptors is of use in law library research: Words or phrases used as Subject Headings.