„SuperThes“: A New Software for Construction, Maintenance and Visualisation of Multilingual Thesauri

Abstract

In the last years, a GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) in all the languages of the EU-member states has been developed within the working program of the "European Topic Centre for Catalogue of Data Sources & Thesaurus" (ETC/CDS), European Environment Agency, (EEA). GEMET is meant to support indexing of metadata within the CDS system. At the same time, an environmental Thesaurus based on the Umwelt Thesaurus (UBA Umweltbundesamt, Berlin) was produced in co-operation between Germany and Austria for their common metainformation system "Environmental Data Catalogue" (Umweltdatenkatalog, UDK). Austrian UDK at http://udk.ubavie.gv.at. To manage and maintain both the CDS-Thesaurus and the UDK-Thesaurus, a THESaurus MAINtenance (THESmain) system as well as a tool for visualising thesauri (THESshow) had been constructed by TBHS on behalf of the ETC/CDS and the Germany/Austria UDK-team. THESmain is fully operational since May 1997 for both applications (CDS and UDK). Both GEMET and UDK-Thesaurus are maintained in Vienna. UDK-Thesaurus Editorial Board at http://www.cedar.at/wgr_home. Since 1999, CNR is working on the Environmental Applications Reference Thesaurus (EARTh), a new Thesaurus for the Environment, encompassing and extending GEMET. To fulfil the requirements of future Thesaurus work, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been concluded in late 2000 between CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, UBA Berlin and UBA Vienna. It has the aim to build a co-operation in order to develop a new software tool for building and maintaining multi-lingual, polyhierarchical Thesauri, based on the experiences of the existing Thesaurus software tools used within the UDK co-operation.