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Classification and Indexing Section

Working Group on
Multilingual Thesauri

Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri

The Working Group met once during the 68th IFLA Congress in Glasgow. On 18-19 October 2002 the Working Group came together at the University of Amsterdam.

The WG discussed the range of the Guidelines. The outcome of this discussion was that the guidelines would deal with building multilingual thesauri from scratch or by merging of existing thesauri and with linking of existing thesauri. With linking the result is not a new (multilingual) thesaurus, but the possibility to use one of the linked thesauri to search in databases indexed with any of the linked thesauri.

Another important result of the considerations is that both thesauri with the same structure of relations between the descriptors for all relevant languages and thesauri with a different structure of relations are considered.

The result of the meetings is a detailed outline of the guidelines with many examples, based on the existing guidelines and on a draft for (monolingual) guidelines for information languages, result of discussions in a British group directed by Stella Dexter Clarke.

Members of the Working Group

Chair:
  • Gerhard J.A. Riesthuis (Netherlands)
Members:
  • Lois Mai Chan (USA)
  • Ia McIlwaine (United Kingdom)
  • Martin Kunz (Germany)
  • Dorothy McGarry (USA)
  • Max Naudi (France)
  • Julio Vaz Rodrigues (Portugal)
  • Marcia Lei Zeng (USA)