The Australian Governments’ Interactive Functions Thesaurus (AGIFT) is a three-level hierarchical thesaurus that describes the business functions carried out across Commonwealth, state and local governments in Australia. It contains 25 high-level functions, each with second and third level terms, as well as non-preferred terms and related terms. A scope note describes the range of activities covered by a preferred term and provides cross-references.

It can be accessed as an online interactive version, or it can be downloaded as a zip file for local use.

AGIFT contributes to the discovery of government information and services online by:

• providing standard terms for government agencies to use in the ‘Function’ element of the AGLS metadata element set
• helping users to search government entry points when they are not sure which terms to use or which level of government has responsibility for the information or service they require
• providing a framework for government agencies to develop a more detailed agency-based functional thesaurus for their own classification needs.

AGIFT uses the following standards to establish terms and relationships:

• ISO 2788 – 1986 Documentation – Guidelines for the Establishment and Development of Monolingual Thesauri
• ANSI Z39.19 – 1980 Guidelines for Thesaurus Structure, Construction and Use