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This study tested the hypothesis that the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on concrete phenomena will, on the average, have fewer synonyms per concept than will the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on abstract phenomena. Subject terms from each of two concrete disciplines and two abstract disciplines were analysed. Results showed that there was a significant difference at the ·05 level between concrete and abstract disciplines but that the significant difference was attributable to only one of the abstract disciplines. The other abstract discipline was not significantly different from the two concrete disciplines. It was concluded that although there is some support for the hypothesis, at least one other factor has a stronger influence on terminological consistency than the phonomena with which a subject deals.

This article sets out the writer's impressions gleaned from an extensive examination of the homepages mounted on the World Wide Web by governments and government agencies. The writer is critical of the quality of the information made available and identifies some possible explanations for the perceived shortcomings of the homepages. A rush to establish a Net presence has encouraged agencies to mount pages without having clearly defined their intended audience. Much of the information is in the form of ‘HTMLised’ documents originally created for other purposes. Frequently these are accessed from pages structured from the point of view of the agency, without reference to the perceptions and needs of the users of the information. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the writer proposes a more rigorous evaluation of Web publishing projects which are led by information professionals and others involved in the direct delivery of information services, with a smaller role for IT personnel than is currently the case.

A rule‐governed derivation of an indexing phrase from the text of a document is, in Wittgenstein's sense, a practice, rather than a mental operation explained by reference to internally represented and tacitly known rules. Some mentalistic proposals for theory in information retrieval are criticised in light of Wittgenstein's remarks on following a rule. The conception of rules as practices shifts the theoretical significance of the social role of retrieval practices from the margins to the centre of enquiry into foundations of information retrieval. The abstracted notion of a cognitive act of ‘information processing’ deflects attention from fruitful directions of research.