We are pleased to announce the latest release of ELSST on 19 September 2018.

Changes that have been made to the source language of ELSST since the last release in September 2017 include the following:

• 49 new concepts
• 54 new Use For terms
• 39 relabelled Preferred Terms (for currency or ambiguity)
• 164 changes to the BT/NT relationships
• 22 new or changed Scope Notes
• 55 deleted concepts

The translation of Preferred Terms for the following languages is 98-100% complete: Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

Since the previous release in September 2017 we have continued our restructuring work, focusing on the following hierarchies:

• WELL-BEING (SOCIETY)
• LAW AND JUSTICE
• ENERGY
• SPORT
• SAFETY AND SECURITY

In each case, we tried to reduce the number of top terms (i.e. terms with no Broader Term) and orphan terms (i.e. terms with no Broader or Narrower Term), in order to make the thesaurus easier to browse. The removal of orphan terms will also make the thesaurus more SKOS-compliant.

We also reduced the number of polyhierarchies wherever possible (this work is ongoing), and applied the Related Term (RT) constraint rule that forbids an RT to be a term’s BT/NT or appear anywhere in its hierarchical structure. Many terms that were previously RTs can now be found by expanding a term’s Tree view.

Work on redistributing the information that was previously contained in scope notes into the new note fields (i.e. Scope note, Scope note source, Use note and History note) was completed for the source language. At the same time, ELSST and HASSET were brought closer into alignment by making their scope notes identical. Thus ELSST concepts that are shared with HASSET (identified as ‘core’ in the thesaurus), now share their Preferred Term label, Broader Terms and Scope Note with HASSET.

The redistribution of scope notes into the new note fields in the target languages is still ongoing.

Further information on the new changes can be found at Changes to ELSST.

Lorna Balkan