This part of ISO 25964 gives recommendations for the development and maintenance of thesauri intended for information retrieval applications. It applies to vocabularies used for retrieving information about all types of information resources, irrespective of the media used (text, sound, still or moving image, physical object or multimedia) including knowledge bases and portals, bibliographic databases, text, museum or multimedia collections, and the items within them. The document also provides a data model and recommended format for import and export of thesaurus data. This part of this International Standard applies to monolingual and multilingual thesauri. This International Standard does not apply to the preparation of back-of-the-book indexes, although many of its recommendations may be useful for that purpose. This International Standard does not cover the databases or software used directly in search or indexing applications, but does anticipate the needs of such applications among its recommendations for thesaurus management.