Factors involved in this choice included the speed of the Access database engine, the flexibility of the Access Basic language, and the availability of a royalty free version which reduces the cost of distributing the end product. The core of the software is the dictionary listing of messages and their corresponding symbol sequences. Along with each message is stored one or more rationales, zero or more theme tags and zero or more user name tags. A theme tag is any word or short phrase denoting a distinguishing characteristic of a group of messages. Any number of themes can be created and used as required.
Themes can overlap.
Theme tags are also used to distinguish between separate message dictionaries in the situation where more than one dictionary is stored in the Vocabulary Organiser software. For example all messages in a dictionary associated with a particular device or program could be tagged with a code of that program or device. User name tags meet the need of linking certain vocabulary to specific users. As with theme tags, any number of users can be created and assigned to specific messages. When a message is tagged with a specific user, it denotes that that message is used by that user.