In 1987, the Integrated Service of Information Resources (ISIR) of the Canadian Workplace Automation Research Centre began to set up a bibliographic data base to manage and make usable its documentation collection. To successfully process the information relevant to the various subject fields, the ISIR had to develop a controlled documentation language that eventually became this thesaurus. Terms are arranged alphabetically in English and French with equivalents in the other language and relationships to other terms in the thesaurus. A hierarchical list is also included. Subject fields include computer science, telecommunications, optics, acoustics and graphics and their specific information-processing applications (production, conversion, storage, distribution and access).