Data has the potential to revolutionize ecological research, but only if it can be located and understood. Finding data for research that spans multiple countries is especially challenging because the data have been documented in many languages. To facilitate data discovery across international data repositories, ILTER Network information managers are collaborating with linguists and knowledge management specialists to develop a multilingual thesaurus of socio-ecological concepts. This resource capitalizes on existing lexical resources such as EnvThes, the US LTER Controlled Vocabulary, and ENVO, and will have applications well beyond the ILTER Network’s data repositories.
Translating and validating concepts and definitions across languages is a challenging task, and ILTER seeks members of the ecological community to share their research and language expertise with us. Are you an ecologist whose native language is not English? Then ILTER invites you to participate in two workshops at the ILTER Open Science Meeting (Leipzig, Germany, 2-6 September 2019):
- Building a Multilingual ILTER Vocabulary: A Translation Workshop: Help translate 100 commonly used ecological concepts and their definitions from English to your native language; and
- Towards a Multilingual ILTER Vocabulary: A Quality and Usability Evaluation Workshop on Translated Terminology: Participate in an evaluation of an instrument to assess the quality of term and definition translations into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Japanese to help develop a mechanism for assessing usability of the multilingual thesaurus.
To participate please register as soon as possible: early bird registration is only possible till 27th May 2019!
Please contact Barbara Magagna via the ILTER Secretariat with any questions you may have.
(Sent on behalf of Barbara Magagna, workshop organiser)
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