Presented during 6-th ICAU Meeting in Prague, 18-19 September
1995
Ewa Chmielewska - Gorczyca
Katarzyna Nowosad
Bozena Dabrowska
THE SEJM LIBRARY
The work of translating the EUROVOC thesaurus began in the Chancellory of the Sejm more than two years ago. After a survey of various indexing tools EUROVOC was chosen as the most suitable one for the needs of different information services of the Chancellory. The goal was to replace various subject retrieval systems existing in the Chancellory and used for different databases, catalogues and files by one indexing language fulfilling the needs of all those services. Until then, subject headings and a variation of UDC were used in the Sejm Library catalogue, home-made classification was used for the database (file) of periodical articles, home-made and very simple thesaurus - for database of legal acts, etc. There was no compatibility between those systems and to use them indexers and searchers had to learn them separately. Besides, the problem of maintenance of several indexing systems was a severe one. The possibility of replacing them with one language, and what is more important - compatible with European Community system of subject approach seemed very exciting and promising.
The work of translating was completed within one year, the result being a database with English, French, German and Polish equivalents linked hierarchically. Unfortunately, most of the time was spent not on finding Polish equivalents but on finding French and German equivalents for English terms (with the help of "Multilingual Thesaurus"), typing them into the computer, linking them with relationships (exceptionally time-consuming), etc. If EUROVOC had been available in the computer form (not only as hard copy version) the work might have been done in half of this time.
First of all we needed the system to be more user-friendly. To achieve this goal certain changes in the EUROVOC policy were necessary. They were:
Of course, all those changes were only introduced to Polish thesaurus and will not be developed in the remaining versions.
The AND reference should not be confused with OR-type reference, that leads from a non-preferred term to more than one descriptors, this time not in combination but as an alternative, e.g. customs check USE customs inspection OR customs formalities It reminds users that the chosen term has to be replaced in the system by two (or more) specific ones.
It helps users to check whether the term chosen by him for representing the content of the document or information query cannot be replaced by the more adequate one.
Even during the translation it was noticed that not all the hierarchical and association relationships were adequate to Polish (or at least Chancellory of the Sejm) needs.
The most crucial problem with hierarchical structure was that our library is not only a parliamentary library but, what is more important , the main (leading) law library in Poland and consequently our collections are mainly on law. Legal subjects are dispersed (scattered) all over EUROVOC (they are in various fields - microthesauri). There are, indeed, some microthesauri dedicated completely to law, e.g. sources and branches of the law, civil law, criminal law, international law, but they are very modest and not gathering the terms that are in fact narrower to them (that are the objects of the particular field of law). Most of the terms connected with law are scattered in different microthesauri, e.g. administrative law (0436 - Executive power and public service), agricultural law (5606 - Agricultural policy), commercial law (2006 - Trade policy), company law (4006 - Company organization), electoral law (0416 -Electoral procedure), energy law (6606 - Energy policy), environmental law (5206 - Environmental policy), family law (2806 - Family), patent law (6416 - Research and intellectual property), data-processing law (3236 - Computer science), transport law (4806 - Transport policy), etc.
To put the legal terminology together and to keep the hierarchical structure that fully corresponds to the legal point of view, EUROVOC has to be "rebuild". A "legal thesaurus was constructed on its base. However, as was already mentioned, translation of EUROVOC was supposed to serve other information services as well, not necessarily dedicated to law. To satisfy the users' needs of those services, e.g. politics or parliamentary oriented thesaurus should have been rebuilt once more, this time organizing its structure from the political or parliamentary point of view. Not to do the same work many times the content of EUROVOC (the set of descriptors) was divided into 10 subthesauri (called system STEBIS):
Other thesauri of the STEBIS system gather all the terminology of EUROVOC specific for the fields to which they are dedicated. The sets of terms separated (isolated) in this way are overlapping. i.e. some terms appear in more than one thesaurus. In this case, they always have the same form and the same set of lead-in terms (UF-terms) appended to them but the semantic relationships may be different. This difference is the reason for creating many thesauri instead of a single one, as there are pairs of terms that are connected with the reverse relationship in different fields, e.g.
In practice, in every thesaurus there exists the main part grouping all the terms typical for this field, e.g. in LAW all terms representing legal concepts, and reflecting the semantic structure adequate to this field, as well as the auxiliary part (fringe areas) containing all the terms from Eurovoc that were needed in indexing though they did not fit to the field (had been recognized as being out of scope of this field). Thus, you can use one thesaurus of the system for searching the database and not have to switch from one to another all the time, but in every one you have different semantic structure (hierarchical and associative relationships).
The following procedure of implementation was used:
Apart from TEZ we have another GBL library TGM for Geographical Names and International Organizations.
That's a pity that not all types of cross-references are created in ACCREF (only seef). That's why we have chosen the option displaying thesaurus record in EXPAND window instead of displaying ACC file record. Only in Thesaurus records all cross-references exist, but there is no possibility to continue direct searching . Polyhierarchy and multilingual aspects of STEBIS are lost. We believe that in the near future all STEBIS advantages can be transmitted to ALEPH.