ELSST: a broad-based Multilingual Thesaurus for the Social Sciences

This paper describes the motivation for, and methodology behind the creation of ELSST (European Language Social Science Thesaurus), a broad-based multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. The thesaurus was produced by the UK Data Archive (UKDA) as part of the EU-funded LIMBER (Language Independent Metadata Browsing of European Resources) project and was derived from their in-house English monolingual thesaurus, HASSET (Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus). The multilingual thesaurus is currently available in four languages English, French, German and Spanish and in various formats, including RDF (Resource Description Framework).