Multilingual Thesaurus of Geosciences

"The Multilingual Thesaurus contains 5823 key terms expressed as descriptors (preferred terms) or non-descriptors (non-preferred terms) in the language versions of the MT. The Multilingual Thesaurus (MT) is compatible with major international and national bibliographic databases and indexing vocabularies. The English (American) version of the MT is compatible with the AGI (American Geological Institute) GeoRef Thesaurus, the French version with the INIST/BRGM (Institute de l'Information Scientifique et Technique/Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières) PASCAL/GEODE Lexique, and the German with the BGR (Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe) GEOLINE Thesaurus. The other language versions are compatible with national thesauri used in Russia (VSEGEI), Spain (ITGE/GEOMINER), Italy (CNR/GEODOC) and Finland (Geological Survey of Finland/FINGEO). The MT gives the documentary equivalents of major geoscience concepts in the languages included at present. The MT is also an operational tool for the development and management of other national geoscience thesauri in a manner that ensures compatibility with other major geoscience information systems. A most interesting aspect of the MT is the possibility of developing multilingual search facilities, i.e. searches can be performed in any of the languages of the MT, and documents may be retrieved that contain the corresponding term in any of the other languages of the MT. At the Geological Survey of Finland the MT has been already been used to enable such multilingual searches. The Finnish index terms or English index terms used in the databases to describe the content can be linked through the thesaurus function of the TRIP system to the corresponding terms in all languages of the MT making all terms for the same concept synomyms irrespective of the language."