Advantages and limitations

(a) Advantages

Using the thesaurus has the following advantages:

• terminological standardisation of indexing vocabularies, allowing more accurate documentary searches;
• multilingualism: establishing language equivalences between identical concepts expressed in different languages allows documents to be indexed in the language of the documentalist and searches to be made in the user’s language;

(b) Limitations

However, EuroVoc has limitations.

• EuroVoc has been designed to meet the needs of systems of general documentation on the activities of the European Union; it is not suitable for indexing and searching for specialised documents;
• EuroVoc cannot claim to cover the various national situations at a sufficiently detailed level; however, efforts are being made to take account of the needs of users outside the EU institutions.