Integrated quality assessment of linked thesauri for the environment

Thesauri usability, within a Spatial Data Infrastructure for the Environment, is pivotal for metadata compilation and data discovery. Thesauri effectiveness is affected by their quality. Diverse quality measures are available taking into account different facets, nevertheless an overall measure is needed whenever thesauri have to be compared in order to identify those to be improved for a proper reuse. The paper proposes a methodology for the quality assessment of linked thesauri aimed at providing an overall quality ranking. It provides a proof of concept of the Analytic Hierarchy Process adoption to the set of linked data thesauri deployed in the Thesaurus Framework for the Environment (LusTRE) developed within the EU funded project eENVplus.