Conférence pour une
infrastructure
terminologique en Europe

Conferencia para una infraestructura terminol�gica en Europa

Conference for a terminology
infrastructure in Europe

Paris, 13-14-15/03/2000
Maison de l'UNESCO, Salle XI
7, place de Fontenoy
75007 PARIS

The DINT/Leather Infocode project (DINT = Developing Innovative Networking for Terminology), co-financed by the EU commission under the MLIS programme, intends to promote web-based cooperation on different kinds of terminology-related tasks. One of the tasks is to create a website that provides terminology, a knowledge base about language and terminology work as well as tools and tutorials. Associated to the project are two sample user groups, the members of the terminology committee of ISO's quality management standardization committee as well as the European leather industry represented by national leather documentation and/or research centers, who turned out to have completely different needs and expectations. The standardization committees needed a web-based terminology database that would allow them to work together between meetings, whereas the Leather Infocode partners expected as an outcome of the project a multilingual thesaurus that would - in a further stage of development - allow them to create a document retrieval system for leather-specific literature.

It was soon agreed that a terminology management system would perfectly suit the needs of the standardization committees where full web interactivity has to be a necessary feature of the software. Some more problems were caused by the selection of a suitable platform for the construction of a (multilingual) thesaurus. After considering some specific thesaurus construction software products it was finally agreed to try MultiTerm, a database software that is generally used for terminology management, but that is designed in such a way that it can also be adapted to a wide variety of different needs. This paper will explain how the MultiTerm database definition was adapted to the rules and standards for thesaurus construction. The MultiTerm version of the final Leather Infocode thesaurus and the generated HTML version for the web presentation of the thesaurus will be demonstrated.

résumés/resúmenes/abstracts