Presents a theory of indexing capable of ranking index terms, or subject identifiers in decreasing order of importance. This leads to the choice of good document representations, and also accounts for the role of phrases and of thesaurus classes in the indexing process. This study is typical of theoretical work in automatic information organization and retrieval, in that concepts are used from mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. A complete theory of information retrieval may emerge from an appropriate combination of these three disciplines.