Health Canada Controlled Subject Vocabulary

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New Terms

• March 2011 Update
• August 2010 Update
• March 2010 Update
• November 2009 Update
• April 2008 Update
• October 2007 Update
• August 2007 Update
• March 2007 Update
• October 2006 Update
• March 2006 Update
• September 2004 Update

Introduction

The Health Canada Controlled Subject Vocabulary was developed to provide subject access to Health Canada's information resources. The Controlled Vocabulary is a bilingual, structured, indexing and information retrieval tool for both publishers and users of the documents and information published on the Health Canada Web site.

The Controlled Vocabulary is a set of preferred terms that can be used to catalogue documents. It standardizes the words associated with a given subject matter, allowing for more precise searches and preventing ambiguous database indexing.

The terms listed in the controlled vocabulary are used in the Dublin Core metadata record for the SUBJECT element, where appropriate and feasible, in order to provide accurate and comprehensive results when searching the Health Canada Web site. The Health Canada Controlled Subject Vocabulary ("gchccv") has been registered with Library and Archives Canada for this purpose.

Scope and exclusions

The scope of the Controlled Vocabulary is dynamic and reflects subjects that have been addressed at one time or another in Health Canada sources. Terms were selected from the Government of Canada's Core Subject thesaurus and various Health Canada products, including publications, databases and related sources.

The following types of concepts have been excluded from the Controlled Vocabulary: geographical names, titles (e.g., of programs), proper names (e.g., of companies) and acronyms, except where they are in common usage.

Language

In the Controlled Vocabulary, French and English have equal weight, neither being the dominant or "source" language. The French and English versions are parallel except for non-descriptors in which correlation between the French and English versions of the Controlled Vocabulary may or may not occur. Exact equivalence is mandatory only for preferred terms (descriptors). Descriptors in French are in the masculine form; for example, "acteurs" is preferred, not "actrices"; "techniciens" is preferred, not "techniciennes" or "technicien(ne)s".

Sample Controlled Vocabulary entry

Medical technology	Used for Health technology	"Used for": indicates terms that are included in the controlled vocabulary to lead to the authorized (or preferred) term. These are words that most often represent either synonymous or variant forms of the main term, or specific terms that, for purposes of storage and retrieval, are indexed under a more general term.
	See Also Medical devices Medical imaging	"See Also": other broader or narrower terms which may be more appropriate to use instead.
	French Technologie médicale	"French": the French translation of the term with a hyperlink to the French term.