GIS Application Improvement with Multilingual Lexical and Terminological Resources

This paper introduces the results of integration of lexical and terminological resources, most of them developed within the Human Language Technology (HLT) Group at the University of Belgrade, with the Geological information system of Serbia (GeolISS) developed at the Faculty of Mining and Geology and funded by the Ministry of the Environmental protection. The approach to GeolISS development, which is aimed at the integration of existing geologic archives, data from published maps on different scales, newly acquired field data, and intranet and internet publishing of geologic is given, followed by the description of the geologic multilingual vocabulary and other lexical and terminological resources used. Two basic results are outlined: multilingual map annotation and improvement of queries for the GeolISS geodatabase. Multilingual labelling and annotation of maps for their graphic display and printing have been tested with Serbian, which describes regional information in the local language, and English, used for sharing geographic information with the world, although the geological vocabulary offers the possibility for integration of other languages as well. The resources also enable semantic and morphological expansion of queries, the latter being very important in highly inflective languages, such as Serbian.