The geek ego

Frank Ryan writes \”Here is a good story – and a true
one!

A consultant colleague who specialised in thesaurus
construction was at a party. She was button-holed by an IT
\”techie\” who was very keen to make an impression. In the
course of their conversation he realised that what they
had in common was \”databases\”. He described at length a
database of internal documents that he and his colleagues
had constructed and how after a few thousand records they
started to add \”tags\” to the records i.e. specific
words describing their content.

At this point my colleague interrupted and said \”Oh, you
mean a thesaurus of controlled terms\”.
The downcast
techie replied \”Has this been done before\”?