General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus

"The basic idea for the development of GEMET was to use the best of the presently available excellent multilingual thesauri, in order to save time, energy and funds. GEMET was conceived as a 'general' thesaurus, aimed to define a common general language, a core of general terminology for the environment. Specific thesauri and descriptor systems (e.g. on Nature Conservation, on Wastes, on Energy, etc.) have been excluded from the first step of development of the thesaurus and have been taken into account only for their structure and upper level terminology. The merging has been performed both on conceptual and formal basis. Coinciding concepts in the different thesauri have been identified and scored. Like in other multilingual thesauri, e. g. Infoterra EnVoc, a neutral alphanumerical notation allows the identification of a concept independently on the user's language.

The links with the original thesauri are ensured by the respective identifiers or code notations. Following the identification of the coinciding concepts, a selection was made by the experts of the National Focal Points of the organisations involved. The resulting 6.562 terms have been arranged in a classification scheme made of 3 super-groups, 30 groups plus 5 accessory, instrumental groups. Each descriptor has been arranged in a hierarchical structure headed by a Top Term. The level of poly-hierarchy, i.e. the allocation of a descriptor to more than one group, has been kept to a minimum. Further, to allow a thematic retrieval of terms thematically related but scattered in different groups, a set of 40 themes have been agreed upon with the EEA and each descriptor has been assigned to as many themes as necessary. Thus, the user can access the thesaurus through the group- hierarchical list, through the thematic list or through the alphabetical list. As a complement to the hierarchical 'vertical' relations, an exhaustive series of strong 'horizontal' relations between terms (RT, Related Terms) have been introduced. A progressive Line Number has been assigned to each descriptor of the systematic list, in order to help the user of the lists to identify the descriptor in the different lists. The Line Number is merely a neutral identifier for the present version. The GEMET size, formerly figured at about 200000 descriptors, rose to more than 5.000 in the course of merging, due to the limited overlapping between the different thesauri, to constraints of the selection work carried out by the parental organisations and to a few new additions, mainly from CDS indexing work. The present version 2001* of GEMET is the result of a close collaboration between CNR and UBA under contract and supervision of the ETC/CDS. It presents 5.298 descriptors, including 109 Top Terms, and 1.264 synonyms in English. The 5.524 terms belonging to the parental thesauri and not included in GEMET, constitute an accessory alphabetical list of free terms. GEMET has been developed as an indexing, retrieval and control tool for the European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources (ETC/CDS) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), Copenhagen."