ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the activities of the Environmental Knowledge Organisation Laboratory (EKOLab) of CNR-IIA and the status of the Environmental Thesauri developed by group. The EKOLab of CNR-IIA started its activities in the field of environmental knowledge organisation in 1992. In the late 1980s, CNR had the idea of a reference language for the environment – a language that could be shared at least at the European level. The terminological resources available at that time included the Multilingual Descriptor System of the European Commission comprised of 1400 terms in six European languages, edited in 1983, and a short Environment Program of the United Nations Infoterra list of less than 200 terms, edited in 1984. Thesauri are widely employed as common ground enabling communication among the different communities working in environment-related domains: they allow users to share and agree upon scientific/technical terms in the target domain and to express them in multiple languages.
