Construction, Maintenance and Visualisation of Multilingual Thesauri Experiences using "SuperThes"

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 pro-gram 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 Cata-logue" (Umweltdatenkatalog, UDK). Austrian UDK at http://193.170.161.213:8080/wwwudk/html/de/start.html , German UDK at http://www.udk-gein.de/ To manage and maintain both the CDS-Thesaurus and the UDK-Thesaurus, a THE-Saurus 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). UDK-Thesaurus Editorial Board at http://www.cedar.at/wgr_home. CNR at present is working on a new Thesaurus for the Environment. 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, UBA Vienna and TBHS Vienna. It's aim was to build a co-operation in order to develop a new software tool for building and maintaining multi-lingual, poly-hierarchical Thesauri, based on the experiences of the existing Thesaurus software tools used within the UDK co-operation. This tool named SuperThes is now ready for work assignment.