The European Science Vocabulary (EuroSciVoc) is a multilingual taxonomy that represents the main fields of science, providing a standardized and organized framework for accessing and retrieving scientific information.
EuroSciVoc is based on the OECD's Fields of Research and Development (FoRD) classification, which has been expanded to include categories identified in Research and Innovation projects’ content through a semi-automatic NLP process.
The taxonomy is organised in a hierarchical structure, where the first two levels align with the FoRD categories, while the lower levels are composed of categories representing established fields of science including specific or emerging topics as they are discovered in project content. It contains over 1000 categories in 6 languages, enriched with relevant keywords, is aligned with Linked Open Data standards and addresses the needs of the users to access and retrieve scientific information in a standardised way
The main features of EuroSciVoc are:
- Multilingual taxonomy (English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish) with over 1000 categories
- Categories enriched with relevant keywords extracted from textual descriptions of Research & Innovation projects
- Alignment with other controlled vocabularies such as AgroVoc, MeSH and EuroVoc
EuroSciVoc contributes to the European Union's Open Science policy as well as the promotion of multilingualism and accessibility in scientific research and communication. It is mainly targeted at researchers and scientists, or universities and research institutions, but also at policy makers and public administrations.
EuroSciVoc is managed by the Publications Office of the EU, uses Linked Open Data standards for interoperability and accessibility, is regularly updated and published on EU Vocabularies’ website