GEMET, the General Environmental Multilingual Thesaurus: Development, User Perspectives and Plans for a Thesaurus System Part 1: overhead presentation Bruno Felluga, CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche, Rome, Italy Part 2: slide show Stefan Jensen, project leader ETC/CDS, Lower Saxony Ministry of the Environment Hannover, Germany Open Forum on Metadata Registries, Santa Fe, NM January 20, 2000 E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY

Outline GEMET presentation - part 2 “linking terminology and applications” E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY GEMET activities performed by the ETC/CDS - co-ordination of the thesaurus development - GEMET usage for indexing and retrieving environmental metadata - development of application around GEMET - assessing 3rd party user needs to incorporate into future developments

Co-ordination of the development E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY - Encouraging and co-ordinating the translation of the core terminology into 12 languages - Contracting application development around GEMET - implement shared coding lists (value domains) - Promoting the use of GEMET through marketing activities - Distributing GEMET and supplying technical helpdesk

GEMET - usage for indexing metainformation E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY GEMET has been used in the work of EEA to index metadata from the following resources: - The Directory of Information Resources (DIR) - The Reporting Obligation Database (ROD) to do this, 2 applications were developed: - MS-Access based tool for metadata registry (WinCDS) - Webbased JAVA tool for online registration(prototype)

Thesaurus part of WinCDS E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY

JAVA based online registration - the indexing E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY

GEMET - usage for indexing metainformation E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY Directory of Information Resources Total dataset sum:931 Controlled terms in use: 655 of ~5300 Total descriptors sum:4714 (GEMET terms used for indexing) Term ranking: 121 of 655 terms have been used more than 10 times

E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY Terms used more than 60 times

DIR : term ranking

E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY Reporting Obligations Database ROD prototype Questions Datasets total: Controlled terms in use: 323 of 5300 have been used times Top ranking: Term ‚atmospheric emissions‘ has been used times Sources Datasets total: 42 Controlled terms in use: 65 of 5300 have been used 256 times GEMET - usage for indexing metainformation

ROD questions: term ranking

between 10 and 33 ROD sources: term ranking

GEMET - usage to browse and retrieve metadata E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY GEMET is used to browse or retrieve metadata within 5 applications: The ThesShow GEMET browser The WebCDS accessing the DIR via HTML The WebCDS accessing the DIR via JAVA applets The multilingual search service (MSS) The Reporting Obligation Database (ROD)

JAVA based thesaurus browser for WebCDS E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY

The Multilingual Search Service (MSS) E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY Motivation –distributed multilingual document collections of European institutions (European Environment Agency, EEA) –support query formulation in user‘s native language –search and retrieve documents in all understandable languages Approach of EEA‘s Multilingual Search Service (MSS) –thesaurus support for query formulation (domain specific thesaurus required, e.g. GEMET) –translation by making use of multilinguality of theseaurus (GEMET is available in 12 languages) –use translations as input for off-the-shelf Web search engine (e.g., Netscape Compass Server)

Using a term for searching metadata E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY

Search results from websites within the EERC E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY

E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY Questionnaire about GEMET usage Goals: - learn more about current users - get guidance from usage for future development Process: - the current ~200 GEMET users from all over the world have been addressed by - the 2 page (+annexes) questionnaire was made available digitally and as a form on internet - Survey was performed in November and December 1999

E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY 42% translation 33% indexing 22% retrieval 56% translation 22% indexing/retrieval 100% translation Areas and frequency of GEMET usage

% Current usage of languages in GEMET

Evaluation of the thesaurus content %

Usage of the GEMET browser ThesShow %

E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY GEMET - conclusions from the own indexing experience and the questionnaire General guidelines: - The GEMET content should remain stable, minor improvements are justified - There is a need to add new functionalities to the tools to allow the user to customise an own “thesaurus system”

Contact information E UROPEAN T OPIC C ENTRE ON C ATALOGUE OF D ATA S OURCES (ETC/CDS) E UROPEAN E NVIRONMENT A GENCY URL: or