1. Definition
EuroVoc is a multi-disciplinary thesaurus covering fields which are sufficiently wide-ranging to encompass both Community and national points of view, with a certain emphasis on parliamentary activities. EuroVoc is a controlled set of vocabulary which can be used outside the EU institutions, particularly by parliaments.
It was originally built up specifically for processing the documentary information of the EU institutions.
2. Objectives
- Provide the information management and dissemination services with a coherent indexing tool for the effective management of their documentary resources;
- Enable users to carry out documentary searches using controlled vocabulary.
3. Owner
EuroVoc is managed by the Publications Office of the European Union, which moved forward to ontology-based thesaurus management and semantic web technologies conformant to W3C recommendations as well as latest trends in thesaurus standards.
4. Intended audience
Eurovoc is used by the European Parliament, the Office for Official Publications of the European Union, the national and regional parliaments in Europe, some national government departments, and European organisations.
5. Long description
Eurovoc contains terms in 23 EU languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Croatian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish), and Serbian.
Using the thesaurus has the following advantages:
- terminological standardisation of indexing vocabularies, allowing more accurate documentary searches;
- multilingualism: establishing language equivalences between identical concepts expressed in different languages allows documents to be indexed in the language of the documentalist and searches to be made in the user’s language;
However, EuroVoc has limitations:
- EuroVoc has been designed to meet the needs of systems of general documentation on the activities of the European Union; it is not suitable for indexing and searching for specialised documents;
- EuroVoc cannot claim to cover the various national situations at a sufficiently detailed level; however, efforts are being made to take account of the needs of users outside the EU institutions.
6. How to participate
All EuroVoc users with proposals and suggestions for amendments are invited to submit a maintenance form available in the Contribute section of the EuroVoc website.
7. History / Key milestones