Forest terminology clearing-house
Rationale
At institutional and individual levels, WSL produces numerous documents in various languages. Consistency, adequacy to target readership, and clarity of terms are often not achieved. Especially in multi-authored documents, terminological harmonisation about the terms to be used and about their definitions needs to be sought.
A further issue is that the terminological knowledge of WSL experts is still undocumented and not available for users such as other WSL staff, internal and external translators, and external partners (e.g. Swiss Agency for the Environment FOEN, scientific partners).
Finally, terminology data are valuable products for the international community. WSL would gain high visibility if these data were included in well-known Web-based terminology databases such as Eurodicautom, GFIS thesaurus and IUFRO's terminology database SilvaVoc. This would also help prevent gross mistakes from being done by our partners, for example wrong wording of WSL's key activities in the ETH-Board 2001 report or confusing terminology used in SAEFL press communiqués.
Project aims
- The overall aim of this clearing-house is to become a leading resource in forest terminology. On the short term, its aim is to provide terminological assistance to WSL scientists and translators in forestry, forest ecology and related fields. On the long term, it is to collect internal and external terminological knowledge available at WSL and reliable external sources (see below). WSL experts will be involved in the quality control of these data.
- A terminology database (English, German, French) was created in 1996 by M. Kaennel for the section "Forest Ecosystems and Ecological Risks". This database will be further developed as an Internet application.
- Selected, quality-controlled terms and definitions will be processed for inclusion into Eurodicautom via TERMDAT, the official terminology database of the Swiss Federal Administration, and into GFIS thesaurus and Silvaterm, IUFRO's forest terminology database.
Methods
- Re-designing M. Kaennel's existing terminology database to improve user-friendliness.
- Surveying and processing relevant and valuable internal resources.
- Collecting and processing external resources (draft GFIS thesaurus, other collaborations with external partners listed below).
- Programming and designing the Web interface of this database.
Work plan
|
2003
|
- Re-designing the existing database
- Collecting internal resources (in coll. with M. Dousse) and external data (in coll. with G. Petrokovky, GFIS).
- Data
processing (on-going activity). As a pilot sub-project, terminological
data may be collected within the framework of the IUFRO Conference
"Applied Forest Ecological Experiments", 5-10 August 2003 in Davos.
|
|
2004
|
- Collecting
resources, data processing. Part of this will be done as a guest of the
Center for the Assessment and Monitoring of Forest and Environmental
Resources CAMFER (University of California in Berkeley)
- Providing assistance to users for specific topics (on-going activity)
- Programming and designing the Web interface of the database
|
|
2005
|
Presenting a beta-version of the database at the IUFRO World Conference in Brisbane
|
|
2006
|
Submitting a project proposal
for the long-term use and management of the database
|
Participants
- Michèle Kaennel Dobbertin (WSL)
- Monique Dousse (WSL)
- Renate Prüller (SilvaVoc, IUFRO, Vienna)
- John Helms (Society of American Foresters / University of California, Berkeley / IUFRO Working Party 6.03.02)
- Franco Fomasi (Termdat, Berne)
- Gillian Petrokovsky (Global Forest Information Service GFIS / CAB International)
- Laurence Bouhot-Delduc (Département de la Santé des Forêts, Paris)
Contact
Link
