摘要：The article aims at illustrating the characteristics and
functions of a monolingual thesaurus, focusing on the Italian Thesaurus of Bioethics (Thesaurus Italiano di
Bioetica, TIB) the controlled vocabulary used to index and retrieve documents within SIBIL (Italian Online
Bioethics Information System). TIB includes controlled terms (descriptors) translated from the Bioethics
Thesaurus adopted by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics of the Georgetown University of Washington and
revised according to the Italian context of study and scientific debate in the field of bioethics. The overall
amount of TIB terms consists in over 1600 headings. Methods to link thesaurus terms hierarchically, by
association and by showing synonyms as recommended in ISO standards are applied with reference to
descriptors drawn from TIB. Future plans to make the English version of TIB available online within European
networks are also illustrated, aiming at spreading information relating to bioethics at an international level.
