A thesaurus is key for multilingual and multicultural cooperation, to ensure we put the same concepts behind the wording and to understand the connections between these concepts.

Between 2004 and 2009, SEMIDE Technical Unit together with its National Focal Points worked on building a multilingual water thesaurus based on an aggregation of existing water glossaries and thesaurus (e.g. GEMET from the European Environment Agency (EEA), the International Hydrology Glossary from UNESCO, French Water Thesaurus). It resulted in a water thesaurus in 7 languages (Arabic, English, French Greek, Italian, Spanish and Turkish). This thesaurus (RDF version) was used to index documents and information as well to facilitate cross-lingual searches.

All the terms and concepts have been integrated in the General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) managed by the EEA, available in a broader range of languages. You can access it below.