A state-of-the-art of Italian Reseach Council (CNR) activities in the area of terminology and thesauri

In this paper the activities in the field of terminology and thesauri carried out by the Environmental Knowledge Organisation Laboratory of the Italian National Research Council will be presented. In 2000 EKOLab started the development of a thesaurus for the environment called EARTh (Environmental Applications Reference Thesaurus). The thesaurus is constantly updated following the growing request of updated terminology in relevant topics. At present it contains about 12.000 terms, in English and Italian. It is provided with hierarchical relations and classified according to a matrix system. In parallel with the development of EARTh, two separate projects were carried on and lead to the development of two thesauri, one on Remote Sensing and GIS and the other on the Snow/Ice environment. Each one of these thesauri contains about 3.500 terms. A 1.500 terms lexicon on pollution and climate changes has recently been created. The Thesauri are handled using SuperThes, a software developed within an International co-operation including CNR, UBA-Austria, UBA Germany and the TBHS company. The web interface is under development.