EUROVOC - State of play - Hoofdinhoud

Council of the European Union Brussels, 13 October 2017

PUBLIC

(OR. en)

12908/17

LIMITE

JURINFO 60

NOTE From: Publications Office of the European Union To: Working Party on e-Law (e-Law) No. prev. doc.: 8730/17 Subject: EUROVOC - State of play

• 1. 

  EuroVoc is a multidisciplinary thesaurus available in 26 languages and classified according

to the EU policies and fields of activities. It is available through the EuroVoc website

(http://eurovoc.europa.eu) and for downloading from the European Union Open Data Portal

(http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/).

• I. 

  Status of the collaboration and integration with other thesauri

• 2. 

  The Publications Office continues its collaboration activities in order to enforce interoperability and to avoid duplication of efforts in the domain of thesaurus maintenance and dissemination across the EU institutions and agencies and other international bodies.

• 3. 

  In May 2017, the Office has finalised the alignment made between EuroVoc and the Thesaurus for Economics (produced by the German National Library of Economics). The alignment is being checked and validated by the latter. At a later stage, the results of this activity will induce the introduction and re-use of the relevant EuroVoc multilingual labels as access point to retrieve the economic literature from the ECONBIZ portal

  (https://www.econbiz.de/).

• 4. 

  Following the delivery of the alignment made between EuroVoc and the Legilux classification (http://legilux.public.lu), the Office is willing to contribute to the validation of the cross-concordances between the Luxembourg legislation and EUR-Lex.

• 5. 

  A survey for the creation of an inventory of European Commission controlled vocabularies

was launched in June 2017, as part of the “Data, Information and Knowledge Management”

initiative at the European Commission. The information collected will not only be used to

create an inventory of vocabularies used/maintained in the Commission, but also to identify

key vocabularies and possible synergies between them. To date, answers have been provided

by 13 Commission directorates-general.

• 6. 

  The Member States are invited to share their national vocabularies in the legal domain in view of their possible alignment with EuroVoc.

II. EuroVoc maintenance activities

• 7. 

  The EuroVoc Committee (Group interinstitutional Lex (GIL)-subgroup EuroVoc) met in

Luxembourg on the 3rd of October 2017 to review the acceptance criteria's for the concepts

proposed for the next release of EuroVoc (4.7). The latter will be published in December 2017

with 25 new concepts . The previous release (4.6) was published on 30 June 2017 with 50

new concepts.

• 8. 

  The Publications Office emphasises the usefulness and relevance of EuroVoc for the private

sector during conferences and through professional contacts. This element has been

considered significant for the definition of a content management policy for EuroVoc, which

was also discussed in the meeting of the EuroVoc committee.

III. EuroVoc dissemination system - Statistics

• 9. 

  For the previous 9 months (January 2017 – September 2017) the number of visits on the

EuroVoc website dropped from 912 594 to 817 287 compared to the same period in 2016. At

the same time, EuroVoc was downloaded 717 times and viewed 15 898 times from the EU

Open Data Portal.

IV. Recent and upcoming developments

• A. 

  EU Vocabularies website

• 10. 

  The development of a new common website for EuroVoc, the Metadata Registry and other

EU reference data produced by the institutions and bodies as well as services for indexing and

retrieving information with those controlled vocabularies started in July 2017. The

Publications Office received three deliveries as planned. The website will be operational at

the beginning of 2018.

• B. 

  EuroVoc production system

• 11. 

  The Vocbench 3.0 project, financed by the ISA² programme, Vocbench 3.0, – aimed at

offering a ready solution for the management, alignment and publication of controlled

vocabularies as linked data – was delivered in July 2017. Following the validation, it has been

made available for the public in the Joinup collaborative platform

(https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/) as an eGovernment solution in the field of interoperability.The

next development phase will start in October 2017

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