The IUGS Commission on the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (COGEOINFO, previously COGEODOC) in collaboration with ICSTI (International Council for Scientific and Technical Information) has recently published the second edition of the Multilingual Thesaurus of Geosciences. The printed version contains six languages English (American), French, German, Russian, Spanish and Italian. The database also contains Czech and Finnish. The Multilingual Thesaurus contains 5823 key terms expressed as descriptors (preferred terms) or non-descriptors (non-preferred terms) in the language versions of the MT.
A most interesting aspect of the MT is the possibility of developing multilingual search facilities, i.e. searches can be performed in any of the languages of the MT, and documents may be retrieved that contain the corresponding term in any of the other languages of the MT. At the Geological Survey of Finland the MT has been already been used to enable such multilingual searches. The Finnish index terms or English index terms used in the databases to describe the content can be linked through the thesaurus function of the TRIP system to the corresponding terms in all languages of the MT making all terms for the same concept synomyms irrespective of the language. Thus for example, when using the thesaurus to search for e.g. "sable" (French for sand), the system finds about 80 hits with the Finnish index terms "hiekka" or "hiekkaesiintymät" (Finnish for sand or sand deposit). A search for "ruda" (Russian for ore deposit) gives about 1300 hits with Finnish index terms ending in "-malmit" or "-esiintymät" (Finnish for ore deposits or mineral deposits). This concept could be further developed to enable a multilingual search of free text by enlarging the synonym lists of each language version.