Digital Dictionary

I

Indexing

Ismaïl Timimi

GERiiCO, Université de Lille, France

While the table of biblical concordances or the table of commonplaces inspired by Aristotle are often considered as ancestor systems of our modern indexes (Huchet 2010), it was not until the middle of the 20th century that the terms “indexer” and “indexing” appeared within dictionaries, from 1948 onwards (Amar 2000).

Indexing is a very old practice, observed for a very long time in socioprofessional environments. And yet, as an object of study, indexing has only recently aroused scientific interest in two very young disciplines – library science and documentation (Timimi and Kovacs 2006). With the documentary proliferation of the Web and the metamorphosis of digital media, its modeling has attracted major interest in search engine algorithms and multimedia indexing.

Indexing, known as a central documentary practice, is a process of analysis and representation of information according to several variables (the nature of the document, the corpus and the field of application, the practices of the users, etc.). It consists of representing, by means of the elements of a free or controlled language, the themes and notions characteristic of the document’s content (resource or collection). The aim is to enable the memorization of the content by a distinctive mark (alphanumeric, nominal or other symbol) to easily find the document during a later search (Chaumier 2000). This gives indexing a semantic and also a semiological ...