ViCoS is a tool for creating relations between different lexical entries or parts thereof. It has been developed by the Technical Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and it is designed to interact with other tools developed there. In particular it is inextricably linked to LEXUS, Lexicon Manipulation and Analysis Tool, as it is from this source that ViCoS draws lexical data.

ViCoS allows users to elaborate on the lexical material provided by LEXUS by way of creating different types of relations between the lexical entries. In particular it has been devised to make it possible to abstract from words as such and to create links between concepts, thus creating a conceptual space. By a conceptual space we understand here a certain informal ontology that describes a given domain by means of predefined relations. ViCoS makes it possible for users not only to create such conceptual spaces by establishing links between lexical entries, but also to define their own types of relations, thus allowing for the creation of all kinds of ontologies.

ViCoS has been designed with the view to enhance language documentation activities by making it possible to complement a linguistic description of a language (grammar, lexicon) with a conceptual account. ViCoS is a perfect environment for visualizing conceptual spaces allowing the users to see which concepts are related, which are culturally most prominent etc. Thus words can be turned into culturally relevant concepts with the help of ViCoS and placed in a network together with others. The aim is to emphasize this cultural aspect of language documentation, as our assumption is that language users model and manipulate a world of concepts and their relations rather than just a set of lexical entries.

Being a web-based tool, ViCoS can be accessed through the Internet from any place in the world. Therefore it can be used not only by scientists (linguists and anthropologists in particular) but also by language community members. These two groups of users can complement each other in the process of language documentation. Speech community members can use ViCoS to describe and visualize their language and culture and to learn from such resources. From the perspective of community members, words are the keys to access and describe the relevant parts of a community's culture. For a community a lexicon is a practical tool and not a theoretical construct, and the understanding of words is best achieved through the multiple associations they evoke, rather than in terms of any abstract theory of meaning. In ViCoS such networks of associations of fuzzily defined concepts can be easily visualized. Community members can therefore be actively engaged in the documentation of their culture and in particular in the process of defining their conceptual space. Scientists on the other hand, such as linguists and anthropologists can use ViCoS to contribute to and exploit the resources for the study of the community's language and culture, as well as to compare them with those of other communities.