EUROVOC - State of Play

Council of the European Union

Brussels, 20 June 2016 (OR. en) PUBLIC

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JURINFO 35 EJUSTICE 116

NOTE From: Publications Office of the European Union To: Working Party on e-Law (e-Law) No. prev. doc.: 14137/15 Subject: EUROVOC - State of play

EuroVoc is a multidisciplinary thesaurus available in 26 languages and classified according to the EU policies and fields of activities, available through the EuroVoc website (http://eurovoc.europa.eu) and for downloading from the European Union Open Data Portal (http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/).

1. EuroVoc dissemination system

1.1. Statistics For the previous year (June 2015 – May 2016) the monthly average number of visits amounted to 25.475 and the monthly average number of unique visitors to 17.212. This represents a slight increase in comparison with the average monthly statistics for the period November 2014 – October 2015 with 25.310 visits and 16.464 unique visitors.

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Conseil UE 1.2. EuroVoc maintenance activities A new release EuroVoc (4.5) will be published by the end of June 2016. In addition to the 6.887 concepts from the previous release (4.4), now 137 new concepts are proposed. The EuroVoc Committee (GIL-subgroup EuroVoc) met on 27 January 2016 in Luxembourg to review the questions about the new release of EuroVoc and for a presentation of Vocbench, the thesaurus maintenance system.

2. Status of the collaboration and integration with other thesauri EuroVoc has been selected by the European Commission (DG COMM) to annotate the content of the web documents published on the European Commission website (Europa). A first training on the use of EuroVoc addressed to the webmasters from the European Commission's services was organised on the 7th of June in Brussels. Follow-up trainings, an indexing support helpdesk and tools to facilitate the work of the webmasters are foreseen. The Publications Office continues its federating activities in order to enforce interoperability and to avoid duplication of efforts in the domain of thesaurus maintenance and dissemination across the EU institutions and agencies and other international bodies. On the 27th of May, the Publications Office organised a web meeting at the request of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library of the United Nations (UN Library, New York). The United Nations Library is in the process of changing its thesaurus management environment and would like to get the return on experience of the Publications Office in term of thesaurus management tools, formats as well as data integration on Semantic Web. It has been decided that the UN library and the Publications Office will collaborate to improve the alignments between UNBIS (UN Thesaurus) and EuroVoc.

3. Recent developments

3.1. Enriched ontology for EuroVoc, Metadata Registry (MDR) and EU reference data The Publications Office will develop a new common website for EuroVoc, the Metadata Registry and other EU reference data produced by the institutions and bodies as well as valued-added services for indexing and information retrieval with those specific controlled vocabularies.

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LIMITE EN A preliminary prototype of the website will be delivered at the beginning of September. This prototype consists of a limited number of web pages for both EuroVoc and the Metadata Registry that will enable to validate the content retrieval and display.

3.2. EuroVoc production system In the framework of the ISA² programme, the project proposal submitted by the Publications Office for the further development of Vocbench has been accepted. The new major version (3.0) of Vocbench will offer a ready solution for the management, alignment and publication of controlled vocabularies as linked data, thus taking away the burdens for public administrations to maintain and publish their controlled vocabularies in an open and interoperable way.

A meeting of the Vocbench stakeholders (European and international) was organised in the Publications Office on 24th and 25th of February 2016 where the requirements for the future versions of Vocbench were confirmed. Stakeholders present at the meeting were FAO (Food and Agricultural Organisation), European Commission (DIGIT), Publications Office of the EU, University TorVergata (Roma), Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (Cabi), Italian Senate and Institut National de Recherches agricoles (INRA).

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