Creating a Multilingual Geospatial Thesaurus: GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas Translations for Italian, Spanish, French and Slovenian

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) are a set of terms of interest for the development of global spatial data infrastructures. These SBAs form a two level hierarchy (categories and subcategories) ranging from natural disasters to human health. The SBAs are used widely by international geographic information sharing initiatives and policy makers. One of the uses of the SBAs is to allow users to search a spatial data infrastructure for resources that relate to the theme of interest (category or subcategory) selected. However, the SBAs are currently only specified in English. In this paper, we provide a translation of the SBAs into Italian, Spanish, French, and Slovenian in order to support multilingual search, and we underline the This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5 th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. DOI: 10.2902/1725-0463.2012.07.art19 International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 2012, Vol.7, 411-440 412 issues involved in the translation. Since some of these issues seem to be strictly related to a few discrepancies present in the original version of the SBAs, this paper also proposes a revision of the original set of terms in English.