The European Thesaurus on International Relations and Area

Studies

A Multilingual Resource for Indexing, Retrieval, and Translation

SWP

Michael Kluck and Axel Huckstorf

Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin

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LREC 2008, Marrakech

European Thesaurus IRASDevelopment of the Thesaurus

– Cooperation project within the EINIRAS Network

– Source thesauri– Cross-concordances

Structure of the Thesaurus

Use Cases of the Thesaurus– Printed edition– Online edition as part of the IREON Gateway– Indexing tool– Translation tool– Semantic heterogeneity service

Online Demonstration

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Development of the European Thesaurus Subject: International Relations and Area Studies (IRAS)

Cooperation project of the European Information Network on International Relations and Area Studies (EINIRAS)

Source thesauri (CoE, RIIA, SIPRI, IFRI, German Network=FIV)

Development path: 24 fields (micro-thesauri), thematic sub-fields, compare source terms, definition of concepts behind the terms, translation work, choice of descriptors and non-descriptors, seman-tic relations, scope notes, original term within source thesauri

Cross-concordances to other terminologies: PAIS Subject Term Th. (EN), Th. Economics and Social Development (DE,EN), Standard Th. Economics (DE,EN), Th. Social Sciences (DE,EN,RU)

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Structure of the multilingual European ThesaurusEnglish as primary language

•Target languages: Croatian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish (Greek planned)

8,200 descriptors •Numerous non-descriptors (synonyms,

acronyms) 24 micro-thesauri

•Subdivided into topical sub-field-groupsCompound terms, phrases (i.e. CFSP) Inclusion of geo and geo-political terms, proper

names (institutions/organisations, treaties/ agreements)

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Thesaurus Versions

Printed version (7 languages)– Systematic part: all 7 languages in parallel– Alphabetic parts: 7 single-language volumes– Only a selected number of non-descriptors included – No display of hierarchical or associative relations

Online version (8+1 languages) within IREON Gateway– Russian coming soon– Searchable in all thesaurus languages– Display of all semantic relations, scope notes, subject

field-groups and sub-groups– Translation can be displayed on demand– (coming soon): Cross-concordances to other thesauri

can be displayed on demand– Alphabetical and systematic display at the entry point– Direct start of search within the IREON gateway

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Thesaurus as an Indexing Tool

Used for World Affairs Online (WAO) database produced by the German Information Network for IRAS (FIV), which is coordinated by SWP, Berlin

Used for the library OPAC of the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), Warsaw

Used for the library OPAC Clavius of the Czech Institute on International Relations (IIR), Prague

European Thesaurus Development Group (ETDG): maintenance, further development

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European Thesaurus as Translation Tool

Direct translation of specific vocabulary in the field of IRAS

Relationships between terms are available

Listing of „word clouds“ in micro-thesauri and sub-fields

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Treatment of Semantic HeterogeneityThe IREON gateway allows an integrated search in

several databases in the field of IRAS. These databases are using different thesauri for indexing their documents.

Between these thesauri cross-concordances are available that were intellectually produced. They are the basic element for the heterogeneity service incorporated into the gateway.

The heterogeneity service allows the mapping of user queries to the different vocabularies of the databases included into the gateway. Thus, the user needs not to know the other vocabularies, the system will do the mappings behind the scene.

The heterogeneity service treats the mapping of descriptors, the translations of terms, the synonyms and acronyms of terms.

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Subject Gateway

Query AQuery Vocabulary A

HT Service

DB AEntry Voc. =Query Voc. A

DB BEntry Voc. B

DB CEntry Voc. C

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Links

IREON Gateway www.ireon-gatewy.eu

EINIRAS Network www.einiras.org

FIV (German Network) www.fiv-iblk.de/eindex.html

GESIS-IZ, Competence Centre Modelling and Treatment of Semantic Heterogeneity, Bonn: developer and provider of HT Service www.gesis.org/en/research/information_technology/komohe.htm