Unification of multilingual scientific terminological resources using the ISO 16642 standard. The TermSciences initiative

The TermSciences initiative aims at building a multi-purpose and multi-lingual knowledge system from different source vocabularies produced by major French research institutions and which were initially intended to be used for indexing and cataloguing scientific literature. Since the construction of language resource repositories is cost-effective and time-consuming, the producers of these vocabularies wished to both share their terminological material and develop common tools for the collaborative management of the integrated resource. Sharing terminologies poses some problems because of the heterogeneous nature of the source data (i.e., coverage, granularity and compositionality of concepts, etc.), and to the discrepancy between partner needs (i.e., simple diffusion of the terminological material, use of the shared material to enhance information engineering tasks, etc.). This paper presents the TermSciences portal1, which deals with the implementation of a conceptual model that uses the recent ISO 16642 standard (Terminological Markup Framework). This standard turned out to be suitable for concept modeling since it allowed for organizing the original resources by concepts and to associate the various terms for a given concept. Additional structuring is produced by sharing conceptual relationships, that is, cross-linking of resource results through the introduction of semantic relations which may have initially be missing. A special emphasis is put on medical resources used in this project, i.e. the French translation by the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) of the MeSH thesaurus from the US National Library of Medicine, the public health thesaurus of the Banque de Données de Santé Publique (BDSP) and the dictionary of human an