Welcome to SYNTHESYS: the European Union-funded Integrated Infrastructure Initiative grant. This five year project which began in February 2004, comprises 20 European natural history museums and botanic gardens, aims to create an integrated European infrastructure for researchers in the natural sciences. SYNTHESYS is split into two activities: Access and Networking Activities. ... [Information of the supplier]
BioSyst.EU represents European scientists dealing with topics of systematic biology. It considers itself as a collaborative counterpart to the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) where European Natural History Institutions have joined, whereas in BioSyst.EU individual scientists are to be represented via their national or regional societies. BioSyst.EU aims to provide a European platform to: a) hold joint meetings on a regular basis; b) promote research, teaching, and training in all areas of systematic biology, including phylogenetic, taxonomic, and biodiversity research; c) encourage collaboration and interchange among researchers, both individually and through their respective societies and institutions; d) coordinate national and international efforts without infringing on the autonomy of the member societies; e) encourage formation of additional national systematic societies, while continuing to represent systematists in countries still lacking formal societies and f) increase the profile and funding of systematic biology in the European parliament. ... [Information of the supplier]
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]
STERNA (Semantic Web-based Thematic European Reference Network Application) is the contribution of twelve European natural history museums and other institutions that collect and hold content on biodiversity, wildlife and nature in general, to the objectives and realisation of a European Digital Library. The project specifically addresses the many small cultural heritage institutions and content providers that want to actively participate and contribute to the European Digital Library initiative but lack both technical skills and financial resources to do so. To help content providers to make their valuable and rich resources available to a wider audience, our vision is to create a dispersed and networked information space, supported and sustained by a member network of autonomous content organisations which serves users with a special interest in nature and wildlife worldwide. The STERNA project is supported and partly funded by the eContentplus programme of the European Commission. ... [Information of the supplier]
