"SuperThes": A New Software for Construction, Maintenance and Visualisation of Multilingual Thesauri"

In the last years, a GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) in all the languages of the EU-member states has been developed within the working program of the "European Topic Centre for Catalogue of Data Sources & Thesaurus" (ETC/CDS), European Environment Agency, (EEA). GEMET is meant to support indexing of metadata within the CDS system. At the same time, an environmental Thesaurus based on the Umwelt Thesaurus (UBA - Umweltbundesamt, Berlin) was produced in co-operation between Germany and Austria for their common metainformation system "Environmental Data Catalogue" (Umweltdatenkatalog, UDK). Austrian UDK at http://udk.ubavie.gv.at. To manage and maintain both the CDS-Thesaurus and the UDK-Thesaurus, a THESaurus MAINtenance (THESmain) system as well as a tool for visualising thesauri (THESshow) had been constructed by TBHS on behalf of the ETC/CDS and the Germany/Austria UDK-team. THESmain is fully operational since May 1997 for both applications (CDS and UDK). Both GEMET and UDK-Thesaurus are maintained in Vienna. UDK-Thesaurus Editorial Board is active at http://www.cedar.at/wgr_home. Since 1999, CNR is working on the Environmental Applications Reference Thesaurus (EARTh), a new Thesaurus for the Environment, encompassing and extending GEMET. To fulfil the requirements of future Thesaurus work, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been concluded in late 2000 between CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, UBA Berlin and UBA Vienna. It has the aim to build a co-operation in order to develop a new software tool for building and maintaining multi-lingual, poly-hierarchical Thesauri, based on the experiences of the existing Thesaurus software tools used within the UDK co-operation.