This is from a response I sent to someone in early 2002, about setting up Clients and Subjects in Déjà Vu.
> On the subject of the subject list. I've found the 
> default list practically useless since it is far too 
> detailed and long for my purposes. Because I deal 
> primarily with business texts (annual reports and 
> such), a lot of my terminology is accounting and 
> finance related, but a great deal also covers the 
> range of products and services that the various 
> companies deal with everything from steel production 
> to IT to postal services. Anyone have any ideas on 
> creating a meaningful subject list
> Any ideas for also adding the source of each glossary?
> Perhaps as a customer name? That way if the terms 
> are duplicated in the TDB (perhaps from real clients 
> and past jobs, as well as general and specialized use),
> I know the source of each term.

SUBJECTS:
First, I would suggest you glance at the file at the Dejavu-L discussion group web site, Dutch_Subject_List.xls.  It’s in Dutch, but enough of it should be understandable to an English reader to give you some ideas.
Next:  after I had been using DV a few months, I looked at my invoice database and wrote down a list of customers and subjects.  I then grouped both lists by industry, putting similar companies and topics together.  Every few months I do some polishing.  Here’s something close to what I’m using now:
1	Oil industry
11	Oilfield operations
12	Geophysical, logging
14	Refining, processing
16	Exploration
2	Engineering, construction
25	Generating
3	Geology
35	Ecology, environment
4	Legal, contracts
42	Legal, Mexico
5	Other industrial
6	Medical
7	Computer, Internet
8	Accounting, finance
85	Insurance
9	News, current events
95	Humor, personal

CUSTOMERS:  List them.  Most of my jobs are actually from agencies, so I tried to use the end customer, which is usually but not necessarily the company that paid the agency.  A few weeks ago I did some consolidation, deleted and added a few new "customers".  Here’s what my customer list looks like now:

1	Oil companies (misc)
11	Company A
12	Company B
13	Company C
2	Oil service companies, manufacturers (misc)
21	Company D
22	Company E
3	General manufacturing, industry
31	Company F, etc.
4	News, current events
5	other customers
51	Customer G, etc. (through 69)
7	computer, internet
If I get a job with a potential new customer or subject code, I ask these questions:  Will this customer’s vocabulary be similar to that of an existing client, or industry?  Or is it simply general vocabulary of the particular industry?  Will I ever have a need to discriminate or extract the specialized vocabulary of this client?  Based on this, I either assign a a  "miscellaneous" customer (1 digit code, above), an existing client (2 digit code, above) or create a new 2 or 3 digit code for the new customer.  For example, I have a client ‘215’, which is a subsidiary of customer 21 but in a slightly different line of business.
As for actually loading the terms into your TDB, I would recommend that you first put them into an Excel spreadsheet.  This has several advantages:  it can be loaded directly into a TDB, it’s a lot easier to work with and check than DV’s Terminology Maintenance, and it allows you to easily define any other fields that you want to import into a TDB.  Here’s what the first line of my standard table looks like:
SourceTerm  TargetTerm  Client  Subject  DateStamp
When you import into the TDB (using Terminology Maintenance), you tell DV that it is an Excel file, and that the "First row contains field names".
I don’t know if this is absolutely necessary, but on a hunch I formatted the Client and Subject columns as text.  Just to make sure, I enter the codes (from the above lists) with a ‘ (single quote) in front so that they stay as text, not as numbers.  I have been doing this for months, and the codes are imported into my TDB exactly as I want them.
To get the DateStamp column in the right format, I first type the date (actually, any date will do) in the cell, and I let Excel format it as a date.  Then I copy that date to all entries in that column of the table.  I figure that one day I might want to extract or delete all entries that I made to my database on (or before or after) a specific date, and this way I can do it easily.
If you feel that this isn’t enough data, I would add another column to my Excel table, with the heading ‘SourceDefinition’.
SourceTerm  TargetTerm  Client  Subject  DateStamp SourceDefinition
Then, you can add other comments, such as, the origin of the glossary.  This will be added to the "Definition / Comments" field in the TDB.  You should be able to use SQL commands on this field, too, while in Terminology Maintenance.
Steven