GEMET, the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, has been developed as an indexing, retrieval and control tool for the European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources (ETC/CDS) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), Copenhagen. The work has been carried out through a contract between the EEA and the ETC/CDS which is led by the Ministry of the Environment of Lower Saxony, includes members of Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden and benefits of the collaboration of other member countries of the European Union (EU), as well as of UNEP Infoterra. The basic idea for the development of GEMET was to use the best of the presently available excellent multilingual thesauri, in order to save time, energy and funds. GEMET was conceived as a "general" thesaurus, aimed to define a common general language, a core of general terminology for the environment. Specific thesauri and descriptor systems (e.g. on Nature Conservation, on Wastes, on Energy, etc.) have been excluded from the first step of development of the thesaurus and have been taken into account only for their structure and upper level terminology. The resulting 6.562 terms have been arranged in a classification scheme made of 3 super-groups, 30 groups plus 5 accessory, instrumental groups. Each descriptor has been arranged in a hierarchical structure headed by a Top Term. The level of poly-hierarchy, i.e. the allocation of a descriptor to more than one group, has been kept to a minimum. Further, to allow a thematic retrieval of terms thematically related but scattered in different groups, a set of 40 themes have been agreed upon with the EEA and each descriptor has been assigned to as many themes as necessary. Thus, the user can access the thesaurus through the group-hierarchical list, through the thematic list or through the alphabetical list. GEMET follows the ISO norms on monolingual and multilingual thesauri. ... [Information of the supplier]
