Edition 4.4 / English language EuroVoc thesaurus Volume 1 Alphabetical version Part B Europe Direct is a service to help you find answers to your questions about the European Union. Freephone number (*): 00 800 6 7 8 9 10 11 (*) The information given is free, as are most calls (though some operators, phone boxes or hotels may charge you). More information on the European Union is available on the Internet (http://europa.eu). Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2015 Print ISBN 978-92-78-41156-5 ISSN 1725-4302 OA-AJ-13-002-EN-C PDF ISBN 978-92-78-41277-7 ISSN 2443-7301 OA-AJ-13-002-EN-N © European Union, 2015 Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged. Edition 4.4 / English language EuroVoc thesaurus Volume 1 Alphabetical version Part B Presentation and user guide 1. Presentation 1.1. Objectives users to carry out documentary searches using con- trolled vocabulary. 1.1.3. ADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS 1.1.1. PURPOSE OF A THESAURUS a) Advantages A thesaurus is a structured list of expressions intend- Using the thesaurus has the following advantages: ed to represent in an unambiguous fashion the con- ceptual content of the documents in a documentary • terminological standardisation of indexing vo- system and the queries addressed to that system. cabularies, allowing more accurate resource de- scription and documentary searches; In natural language, a concept can be represented by a number of equivalent expressions (for exam- • multilingualism: establishing language equiva- ple, agro-industry and agri-foodstuffs industry, or lences between identical concepts expressed in processing of agricultural products and agricultural different languages allows documents to be in- product processing industry). dexed in the language of the documentalist and searches to be made in the user’s language. The role of the thesaurus is to monitor vocabulary, b) Limitations ensuring that each concept is represented by a pre- ferred term. The meaning of the concept is clarified However, EuroVoc has limitations: by the links between concepts and terms in the the- • EuroVoc has been designed to meet the needs of saurus. systems of general documentation on the activi- Synonyms or equivalent terms, called non-preferred ties of the European Union; it is not suitable for in- terms, are never allocated as indexing terms, but in- dexing and searching for specialised documents; stead direct users to the appropriate preferred term. • EuroVoc cannot claim to cover the various na- tional situations at a sufficiently detailed level; 1.1.2. PURPOSE OF EUROVOC however, efforts are being made to take account of the needs of users outside the EU institutions. EuroVoc is a multilingual thesaurus which was origi- nally built up specifically for processing the docu- mentary information of the EU institutions. 1.2. Fields covered It is a multidisciplinary thesaurus covering fields The EuroVoc thesaurus covers all the activity fields of which are sufficiently wide-ranging to encompass the EU institutions: both European Union and national points of view, • politics with a certain emphasis on parliamentary activities. • international relations EuroVoc is a controlled set of vocabulary which can • European Union be used outside the EU institutions, particularly by • law parliaments. • economics The aim of the thesaurus is to provide the informa- • trade tion management and dissemination services with • finance a coherent indexing tool for the effective manage- • social questions ment of their documentary resources and to enable • education and communications 3 — Volume 1 — Alphabetical version — Part B • science • free concepts used for indexing documents in • business and competition the Commission’s EC-01 database, with their in- • employment and working conditions dexing frequency; • transport • free concepts used by the Publications Office to • environment draw up the indexes to the Official Journal. • agriculture, forestry and fisheries • agri-foodstuffs After an initial test carried out by the European Par- • production, technology and research liament and the Publications Office, the first edition • energy of the EuroVoc thesaurus was published in 1984 in • industry seven languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, • geography German, Greek and Italian) in two volumes: an alpha- • international organisations. betical thesaurus and a subject-oriented thesaurus. This thesaurus immediately came into use at the Eu- Some fields are more highly developed than others ropean Parliament and the Publications Office. because they are more closely related to the EU’s centres of interest. Thus, for example, the names of 1.3.2. EDITION 2 the regions of each EU Member State are in EuroVoc but not those of non-member countries. The second edition of the thesaurus, published in The grouping of concepts into fields is to a certain 1987, was the result of a thorough revision of the first extent arbitrary. One of EuroVoc’s distinctive features edition, based on the indexing experience gained at is the limitation of polyhierarchy. Concepts which the European Parliament and the Publications Office. could fit into two or more subject fields are thus Two new language versions (Portuguese and Span- generally assigned only to the field which seems the ish) were added to the seven original languages. most natural for users, in order to facilitate the man- Three additional versions — the multilingual thesau- agement of the thesaurus and limit its volume. rus (1987), the permuted thesaurus (1989) and the terminogrammes edition (1990) — accompanied the two original versions (alphabetic thesaurus and 1.3. History — successive editions subject-oriented thesaurus). The second edition of EuroVoc met with increasing 1.3.1. THE BEGINNINGS OF EUROVOC interest outside the EU institutions among national In 1982, following a comparative study of the docu- parliaments, in national and regional administrative mentary languages used internally in the institutions, bodies and even in the private sector. the European Parliament and the European Commis- In 1989, the European Parliament and the Publica- sion decided to construct a multilingual thesaurus tions Office, respective owner and manager of the covering the fields which were of interest to the EU thesaurus, took the initiative to organise a first semi- institutions that would comply with the relevant in- nar for EuroVoc users. This seminar provided guid- ternational standards. ance for decisions on the management and mainte- The work was based on: nance of the thesaurus. One of these decisions was to set up a maintenance • an initial draft of a monolingual thesaurus drawn structure which would take account of the proposals up by the European Parliament, using in particular of all thesaurus users, irrespective of whether they the content of the OECD macrothesaurus; worked in the EU institutions. An update of the sec- • an initial version of the European Commission ond edition was published in 1990 in the form of a Libraries Catalogue (ECLAS) thesaurus used by fascicule. the Commission’s Central Library, dating from 1978, together with the indexing frequency of its 1.3.3. EDITION 3 concepts; today, the EuroVoc and ECLAS tools are still closely linked, particularly with regard to the The third edition of EuroVoc was published in 1995. choice of candidate concepts; Following observations from users concerning the • candidate concepts from the Automated Central accuracy of certain language equivalents, the dif- Documentation Service (SCAD); ferent language versions of EuroVoc were revised 4 Presentation and user guide thoroughly by a multilingual team of translators and specialist documentalists), is a key component in terminologists at the European Commission. the system. It has the task of examining the propos- als for updating the EuroVoc thesaurus, and meets The third edition comprises three volumes per lan- twice a year. The Publications Office takes charge of guage, instead of the five volumes of the previous the technical organisation of these meetings and edition. coordinates the work. A standing group in the main- After consulting the users, the permuted and alpha- tenance team is managed by the Publications Office. betical presentations of the thesaurus were merged. Edition 3.1 was developed with a view to meeting The new alphabetical presentation provides pre- the urgent indexing requirements. In addition to the ferred terms in their semantic context and includes terminological updates and 142 new concepts, this references for non-preferred terms. edition exists in two new languages, namely Finnish The new subject-oriented version comprises the and Swedish. associative relationships present in the termino- grammes edition. The publication of termino- On 22 December 2000, two Internet sites were grammes was abandoned following the difficulties opened on the Europa server: experienced when publishing the second edition and owing to the fact that users were less interested • for the public, the dissemination site presenting in this type of presentation. Edition 3.1 (http://eurovoc.europa.eu); Compared with the previous edition of the thesau- • for the members of the Maintenance Commit- rus, 566 concepts were added and 26 deleted. tee, a special system which automates the shared Based on this edition, EuroVoc has been used as an management of the thesaurus. indexing tool for the documentary databases of the Publications Office for the production of catalogues 1.3.5. EDITION 4 and tables of the Official Journal. The fourth edition of EuroVoc was disseminated on 1.3.4. EDITION 3.1 the Internet on 26 November 2002, following a thor- ough revision of the thesaurus. In view of changes in In October 1999, the Management Committee of the spelling rules, corrections were made to the Dutch, Publications Office entrusted the task of preparing a English and German versions. In accordance with new edition of the EuroVoc thesaurus to two new users’ wishes, no changes were made to the overall interinstitutional committees — the Steering Com- structure but 364 new concepts were added com- mittee and the Maintenance Committee. These pared with Edition 3.1 and nine were deleted.