In Appendix 3 you can find the animal welfare vocabulary very roughly sorted into a selection of standard categories which form some crude facets of the subject. I hope you were able to attempt some analysis yourself and found it not too difficult. In this chapter we shall look at how the terms are organized into a more helpful order, so that the precise relationships between terms begin to emerge. The facet of animals will be used to show how this is done, but I shall include some examples from other facets so that you can see that the method can be applied to all categories of terms.

Vocabulary control

At this stage it is not necessary to bring the full range of vocabulary control techniques into play, but we do need to identify synonyms so that we avoid the possibility of having the same concept in different places under different names.

The animals facet contains a number of examples of two kinds of synonym: the first is the existence of common names for animals alongside their Latin equivalents; the second is the presence of different common names in UK and US English. There are four Latin names in our facet, given here with their English equivalents:

There are also three synonyms for one animal, ‘hogs’, ‘pigs’ and ‘swine’, and two for another, ‘chickens’ and ‘hens’.

As a preliminary to making any decision about the preferred terms, we can bring these synonyms together so that the concepts they represent are not in two or more places in the list. This also ensures that the preferred and non-preferred terms are kept together so that when a choice is made the USE and UF relations can be assigned speedily.

Synonyms are easily grouped by putting them in a row in the alphabetical sequence. At this stage we don't have to decide on the preferred term, as long as they all sit together.

A section of our amended list would now look like this: