1. Gerard.Cunningham@unep.org Environmental Thesaurus/Terminology Workshop United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) International Environment House Geneva, Switzerland; 14-15 April 2004 UNEP: ENVOC Thesaurus

2. Division of Early Warning and Assessment Environmental Information Many different sources of definitions  European Union Council Directive 90/313/EEC  Europe’s Environment – The Dobris Assessment, 1995  Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (1998) Any information in written, visual, aural, electronic or any other material form on: (a) The state of elements of the environment, such as air and atmosphere, water, soil, land, landscape and natural sites, biological diversity and its components, including genetically modified organisms, and the interaction among these elements; (b) Factors, such as substances, energy, noise and radiation, and activities or measures, including administrative measures, environmental agreements, policies, legislation, plans and programmes, affecting or likely to affect the elements of the environment within the scope of subparagraph (a) above, and cost-benefit and other economic analyses and assumptions used in environmental decision-making; (c) The state of human health and safety, conditions of human life, cultural sites and built structures, inasmuch as they are or may be affected by the state of the elements of the environment or, through these elements, by the factors, activities or measures referred to in subparagraph (b) above;

3. Division of Early Warning and Assessment UNEP Thesaurus History  1977: Infoterra database glossary – Ver 1 (unstructured, alpha list of terms)  1984: Infoterra thesaurus – Ver 2 (structured, published E, F, R, S)  1990: Infoterra thesaurus – Ver 3 (refined structure, additional languages – C, A + others).  1997: ENVOC thesaurus – Ver 4 (new terms, KWIC added, published in E,F,S,R,C,Czech, Polish and Japanese but 1500 terms available in 23 languages)  2004: ???

4. Division of Early Warning and Assessment ENVOC Structure: 3-tier hierarchy 10000 ATMOSPHERE - Category 10100 Atmospheric composition - Sub-category 10110 Air quality- Base terms 10120 Atmospheric chemistry 10125 Atmospheric components  18 Categories on environmental themes  Content coverage is general (high aggregation of terms)

5. Division of Early Warning and Assessment ENVOC Layout Five sections: 1. Outline of Categories and Sub-categories 2. List of Terms in Code Sequence 3. Categorised List of Terms 4. Alphabetical List of Terms 5. KWIC (KeyWords In Context)

6. Division of Early Warning and Assessment Categorized List of Terms 20000 ENERGY 20100 Energy Sources Agricultural wastes (22104) UF: Agricultural effluents Bagasse NT: Crop waste (22112) Farmyard waste (22116) Slaughterhouse waste (22178) RT: Biomass energy (22108) Animal dung as fuel (22102) RT: Biomass energy (22108) Biogas(22104) RT: Anaerobic processes (21318) Biomass (20106) RT: Biomass energy (22108)

7. Division of Early Warning and Assessment KWIC (KeyWords In Context) Waste minimization Mining Offshoremining use: Offshore oil drilling Open-cast mining use: Strip mining Sea bed mining Strip mining Mining engineering Mining geology Restoration of mining lands

8. Division of Early Warning and Assessment ENVOC target audience 1. Developing country users are a key target group and language is important 2. Users tend to require general environmental content, not highly specialsied 3. Multiple users – librarians, documentalists, database developers, GIS specialists, translators, environmental information practioners

9. Division of Early Warning and Assessment  Micro thesaurus of macro terms (for the general user)  Macro thesaurus of micro terms (for the specialist user)  Good language coverage Towards a Global Thesaurus (UNEP, EEA, USEPA, CNR) Meeting different user needs

10. Division of Early Warning and Assessment UNEP thesaurus support & linkages  Infoterra thesaurus was a key input to GEMET (only thesaurus with English as as language)  CNR (Italy) provided thesaurus development support to UNEP (thesaurus vers. 3 & 4)  Infoterra network provided language translation & publishing support (R, C, Hindi,Japanese, Thai, Indonesian & European languages, e.g. Albanian)  UNEP leading terminology work under EcoInformatics partnership (EEA, UNEP, USEPA, USGS) URL: http://ecoinfo.eionet.eu.int/eco_terminology.html