Just recently a survey about “Controlled vocabularies” and their significance for enterprise information management has started. Until today 143 participants have responded and completed the survey at least partially. To give a first example what was found out, I would like to take a closer at the question: What are the main application areas of controlled vocabularies from your perspective?

A bit surprising is the intermediate result, that it´s not “Semantic Search” or “Support of multilingual applications” which was considered to be the most important application. Instead of this it turned out that “Data Integration” is king:

The bar graph shows the weighed value of each application candidate (1.0 would be a 100% acceptance that this is an important application area of controlled vocabularies). Regarding the top candidate “data integration”

• 57,4% said “very important”
• 29,8% “relevant”
• 7,4% “somewhat relevant”
• 2,1% “not relevant”
• 3,2% “Don´t know”

If you don´t think this should be the final result, please help to get a better overview of what´s going on in the controlled vocabularyControlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designer of ... community. The survey is open until May 18th, 2011 – all participants will gain access to a report with the results within the following month. Most interesting results will be made public on this blog.