AEGiS-14IAC: European multilingual thesaurus on AIDS and HIV infection.

14th International AIDS Conference


Barcelona, Spain - July 7-12, 2002

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European multilingual thesaurus on AIDS and HIV infection.

Int Conf AIDS 2002 Jul 7-12; 14:(abstract no. G12542)

Figueras YC, Roman Garcia MR
Sida-Studi, Barcelona, Spain

BACKGROUND: In 1993 the NGO Sida-Studi participated, together with other European Union data centres, in the development of a thesaurus specialized on HIV/AIDS. Until then there was no controlled vocabulary for all issues related to HIV/AIDS. Moreover, due to the constant growing number of publications, their multidisciplinary aspect and the information sources diversity, made essential the creation of a complete and up-to-date documentation language in order to facilitate both analysis and documentation research.

METHODS: The thesaurus includes all fields on HIV infection: issues related to human sciences, public health and medical aspects and research. First part of the work: to fix the existing documental vocabulary about HIV/AIDS. Once developed the versions in different languages (being Sida-Studi in charge of the Spanish version), the thesaurus were tested to know other documentalist opinion. The vocabulary analysis allowed deciding on the thesaurus structure: a main thesaurus which includes six fields divided in micro-thesaurus and in a geographic thesaurus. Second part: Terms distribution amongst all micro-thesaurus: to attribute the category of descriptors or non-descriptors, development of semantic equivalent relationships and construction of hierarchical and associative structures.

RESULTS: In 1999 the Thesaurus was released in CD-ROM adding a larger number of descriptors and application notes, as well as synonyms and application relationships. The CD-ROM was distributed within European organizations with a small body of documentation to facilitate its use whenever they had to process their own library materials and documents.

CONCLUSIONS: The thesaurus (the only one specialized on HIV/AIDS) is an essential documental language for documentation and information centres specialized on HIV/AIDS in order to catalogue and, afterwards, gather them again according to the user requests.

Keywords: AEGIS, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, HIV Infections, Vocabulary, Controlled, Natural Language Processing, Research, Language, HIV Seropositivity, Medical Informatics Applications, European Union, HumanKWDaegis,acquiredimmunodeficiencysyndrome,hivinfections,vocabulary,controlled,naturallanguageprocessing,research,language,hivseropositivity,medicalinformaticsapplications,europeanunion,human

020707
G12542

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