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]
The Semantic Network Service (SNS) of the Federal Environment Agency provides support for all questions concerning environmental terms including the common place names. SNS contains a bi-lingual (German/English) semantic network which consists of three components.: (1) the Environmental Thesaurus UmThes® with its 33,759 inter-networked terms. UmThes® also is the German source of the European GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) (19 languages); (2) the Geo-Thesaurus-Environment (GTU) with 18,931 geographic names and the spatial intersections of all these places; (3) an Environmental Chronology of current or historical events that affected the environment. ... [Information of the supplier]
This glossary has been developed to help botanists who are not fluent in Chinese, but have a sincere desire and patient determination to translate descriptions in whole or in part. It may also be useful for Chinese botanists searching for equivalent English terms. Begun in the autumn of 1980, the project was my sanctuary while teaching English at the South China Agricultural College outside of Guangzhou in the People’s Republic of China. Hu Shiu-Ying, Research Botanist at the Arnold Arboretum, invited me to accompany her to China and indulge my fledgling interests in pharmacognosy. I planned to stay only a few weeks and return home. When my travel visas, then required for every city, became difficult for our hosts to obtain, I opted to return to Guangzhou and help Dr. Hu’s school friend, Florence Lee. She needed a native English speaker to lecture in their language program until the American ESL teachers arrived. Their visas were never approved and I finished teaching the six-month course. What I lacked in experience and training, the students provided in enthusiasm and curiosity. The students, in fact, were mature scholars from various disciplines of agriculture who were earnestly preparing for fellowships abroad. This unbelievably dedicated group of about eighty men and women from all parts of China had survived the Cultural Revolution and the political devastation that uprooted their education, careers, personal lives, and national heritage. While the trial proceeded for the deposed leaders known as The Gang of Four, I tried to define the cultural differences between our countries to prepare the students for an academic environment outside of China. In turn, they taught me simplicity, collaboration, and the intrinsic beauty of the Chinese characters. ... [Information of the supplier]
