The Digital Europa Thesaurus (DET) is the controlled vocabulary that should be used across websites of the European Commission to describe the main subject matter of content, by tagging it with its terms (also called concepts). DG Communication is the creator and owner of the DET.
The DET's concepts are organised hierarchically with broader/narrower (parent/child) relationships. When you browse it on the Publications Office website, each top concept expands to show all of its children. Clicking on any of the concepts opens up an information page about individual concepts.
How does the Digital Europa Thesaurus work?
Each DET concept has a unique identifier online (URI, for Uniform Resource Identifier) that is assigned and maintained by the Publications Office. While the concept identifier is intended for machine readability, each concept has human readable labels.
For example, food safety, the concept, has the identifier http://data.europa.eu/uxp/6569. Food safety (the English human readable representation of this concept) and all its language variants are labels attached to the identifier ending with 6569. Concept labels and synonyms are available in all official EU languages. It is possible to change the labels, updating them as needed to reflect the evolution of terminology, make corrections, or add new synonyms. All the while, the identifier for the concept remains stable and unique.
Many DET concepts also have extra information beyond the labels, such as indications of related concepts, definitions, scope notes, synonyms, acronyms, and alternative spellings. You can see this information when you display the individual record view for a concept. For food safety, food safety is the preferred label, while safety of food, food quality safety and food product safety are alternative labels (synonyms). The instruction ‘UF’ (‘Use for’) indicates that someone looking for ‘safety of food’ as a label should use ‘food safety’ instead. Food safety has multiple narrower concepts (children, under NT1, i.e. ‘Narrower term’), such as food contamination. The direct parent (indicated by BT, i.e. ‘Broader term’) of food safety is EU food chain. The language equivalents are listed on the right side, next to their language codes.
Tagging with the DET: Overall guidelines
The objective of tagging with the DET is to enable aggregation systems and users to find and aggregate similar subject matter content. It may be helpful to think of the tagging process as a sorting of content into different subject categories or buckets. Each subject ‘bucket’ should contain content that has similar subject matter. For example, a ‘plastic waste’ concept bucket should group content that shares the same main subject: plastic waste.
The objective should not be to describe every possible subject matter or mentioned topic in a piece of content. Tagging should focus on describing the main subject matter of the content as a whole and not on its individual parts.
Tagging strategies and guidelines should strive for consistent use of concepts for describing similar content or reinforce consistency among multiple individuals tasked with tagging similar content.
Tagging with the DET: dos and don’ts
When tagging with the DET, you should:
- Analyse the content – identify the main subject of the content as a whole
- Ask, what is this about? (not ‘what is merely mentioned?’)
- Verbalise the subject matter in your own words.
- Review the DET for concepts that are closest to the way you just described the subject matter. Currently, the best way to do this is to browse the hierarchy of the DET as published on the Publications Office’s site. From this page, in Tree view, click ‘Expand all’, then ‘Hide RT’ to get an overview of all of the DET’s concepts and their hierarchical relationships.
You should also:
- Remember that a controlled vocabulary is not intended to express nuance but rather to describe content so that items on a similar subject can be found together.
- Consider how a combination of concepts may best express the ‘aboutness’ of the content. For example, if the content is about creating a circular economy for plastic waste, tag the content with two concepts from the DET: circular economy AND plastic waste, instead of looking for the concept of “circular economy for plastic waste”.
- Always consider if this content makes sense as part of a search result alongside other content tagged with the same concept, e.g. in the example above, on circular economy.
- Keep in mind that typically, one or two concepts are enough to properly tag a content element by subject using the DET.
- Tag with the narrowest concept(s) possible. For example, if your content is about strategic stocks of gas, you would tag it with strategic reserves, not with energy storage, which is a broader concept.
Adding concepts to the DET
Stakeholders can propose new concepts to the DET. New concepts are added to the DET if:
- They satisfy the DET’s need for covering a subject, keeping in mind that the DET’s objective is to help users find content from across the European Commission's web presence.
- No other concepts in the thesaurus (or their synonyms) or combination of concepts convey the same meaning.
If you believe you need a new concept, send the English version of the proposed concept to COMM Europa Management, along with the following:
- Minimum of 3 examples of content which needs to be described with the candidate concept and an explanation of the content's main subject matter that could help in evaluating the candidacy (Mandatory)
- A proposal for the position of the candidate in the DET hierarchy (where should it 'reside' in relation to other DET terms, broader and narrower?) and any synonyms for the proposed concept in English or other languages, as well as any acronyms. (Recommended)
- A definition of the concept in English (1-2 sentences in length) (Mandatory)
- Any concepts already in the DET that should be marked as related to the candidate (Recommended)
The taxonomy manager will then decide on the inclusion of the concept into the DET or suggest concepts that can be used instead of the proposed concept.
Adding a new term to the DET takes time
Since the DET is managed as a centralised service by the Publications Office, updates to the DET follow its publication schedule - usually a quarterly one. Therefore, you should expect several months to elapse between the request for a new concept and the time it becomes available. The same is true for most of the other vocabularies centrally managed by the Publications Office.
Contact and support
Need further assistance on this topic? Please contact the team in charge of Europa Domain Management (EU Login required).