Hungarian and Icelandic have been added to CESSDA's multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences!

The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. The September 2022 release includes two new languages: Hungarian and Icelandic. Staff from the Centre for Social Sciences Research Documentation Centre (TK KDK) in Hungary and DATICE (The Icelandic Social Science Data Service) worked with the ELSST team to produce the new translations.

ELSST is now available in sixteen languages: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Existing language versions have also been updated where possible, including the addition of Definitions and Scope notes for the Lithuanian translation.

ELSST content work this year includes completion of the revision of concepts related to sexuality, and an update of terms relating to migration.

This release also sees a number of technical innovations designed to improve ELSST compliance with the FAIR data principles. These include:

• more defined versioning (this release of ELSST is Version 3);

• improved visibility of deprecated concepts; and

• transfer to a simpler, more streamlined SKOS concept scheme. 

SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) provides a standard way of coding information in thesauri and other similar controlled vocabulary systems to enable it to be passed easily between different computer applications.

For more information see the Version 3 Release notes.

Background:

ELSST is owned and published by CESSDA. The thesaurus is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary. It covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and environmental science.