CESSDA Voice

Vocabularies in CESSDA (VOICE) is a service to manage the multilingual content of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives European Research Infrastructure Consortium (CESSDA ERIC). This project aimed to define a CESSDA-wide policy regarding the creation and maintenance of multilingual content.

Ongoing structural work was needed, both exploring and suggesting new and updated English terms and their places in the hierarchies, as well as co- ordinating and supporting the work of the translators, approving all updates and making regular releases of the content.

The thesaurus management system encompasses the data input interfaces, the database to store the concepts and the software to manage this. This needs to be maintained so that the thesaurus can function. The system was reviewed after use by the CESSDA Service Providers (SPs) with the aim of enhancing this for the translators and users of the thesaurus. It was also relocated to the CESSDA Technical Infrastructure.

Management and co-ordination of multilingual controlled vocabularies was also required by CESSDA. Consequently, CV Manager was developed (via a separate work plan task) and CESSDA widened to include content from additional Service Providers. Best practice guidelines and some training modules were also developed to guide the content translation process and assist users of ELSST.

UK Data Service contribution

• Principal Investigators: John Shepherdson, CESSDA ERIC; Anne Etheridge, Sharon Bolton, UK Data Archive
• Project Officers: Lorna Balkan, Suzanne Barbalet and Jeannine Beeken, UK Data Archive
• Funder: CESSDA ERIC
• Project dates: 01 January 2018 to 31 December 2018
• Links: CESSDA ERIC, ELSST