Towards a Multilingual Framework for SEIS

Abstract

Effective sharing and reuse of environmental data are still desiderata. In particular, a crucial issue is to make data readily and reliably accessible over time through a shared interpretation of the knowledge over cultural and languages barriers. Many knowledge organization systems such as thesauri, classifications and taxonomies have been developed in recent years especially since the European Community has started to address the management of geographical and environmental information at European scale. However data are usually maintained by different institutions; they are sometimes domain specific, and often exposed through rather different interfaces and different encodings. The paper proposes a flexible solution in order to scale the environmental domain complexity, promoting a first stage of a Common Thesaurus Framework for the Environment which harmonises and integrates the available terminological resources for the Environment. It has been realised for nature conservation within the EU project NatureSDiplus and further exploited in NESIS project in order to define the requirements for the implementation of SEIS communication.