| Rationale
Project aims
Methods
Work plan
Participants
Links
|
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, Forests and Landscape SAEFL,
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.
- 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.
- 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.
| 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 |
|
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