News

ENBI Work package 11 

 Multi-lingual Access to European Biodiversity Sites

 The first workshop in relation to the ENBI-project and work package 11 ("Multi-lingual Access to European Biodiversity Sites") was conducted as scheduled in the beginning of October 2003 (6.-7. Oct. 2003) at the Institute for Marine Research (IfM) in Kiel. The major purpose of this workshop was to introduce the translation partner, to establish the translation consortium for work package 11, to make translation partners familiar with the ENBI project in general and specifically with the tasks of work package 11, to introduce tools and techniques necessary to provide multi-lingual access to biodiversity information in the Internet and to train partner on the encoding procedure of the specialized dictionaries. Partner contracts were negotiated and finally settled at the workshop. A detailed workshop report is available at the download area of this site. Visual workshop impressions can be seen here.

2nd Workshop on "Multi-lingual Access to European Biodiversity Sites", Institute of Marine Research, Kiel, Germany, 20. – 21. September 2004 conducted Workshop Report. A detailed workshop report is available at the download area of this site.

A third and final WP-11 'How to proceed' workshop was conducted at the 19^th of January 2005 in Chania, Crete. Most translation partner of WP 11 participated in the workshop. Major topic was the discussion on strategies about the dissemination of the attained results. A detailed workshop report and the results will be delivered along with the final technical report of WP-11. The WP-11 workshop in Chania was organized in the frame of the " ENBI in Chania –Week" from 16^th to the 22^nd of January 2005 with other ENBI related workshops and meetings taking place. The WP-11 coordinator thus has attended also the ENBI-Continuation Workshop and the ENBI Digitization Workshop.

Encoding of FAO lists of common names in English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Greek, Italian into the Catalogue of Life database (Species 2000) has made good progress (about 10,000 names from FAO, 5,000 names from ITIS, several hundred additional names from books; among them 10,000 Fish, 5000 others) and is an ongoing effort. The compilation is available on the most recent Catalog of Life CD-ROM. (Species 2000) and soon in the Internet. The IUCN red list of threatened species will be entered soon.

OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System) adopted the translation strategies as suggested from ENBI, WP 11 for Biodiversity Information systems and provided lists of labels which were translated from the ENBI WP11-translator team into the respective languages. The results (static translation at present) are under evaluation in an internal testing procedure, but will be open for public access soon.

An Interface in the Internet was programmed which serves as “portal” to existing biodiversity glossaries in the Internet, including the FishBase glossary. An example of how different glossaries can be implemented in a web site is given at http://filaman.uni-kiel.de/search. This page also offers machine translation of definitions into several European languages. The translation is based on the online service offered by the European Commission.

The results of WP-11 were presented at the Joint ENBI & Species 2000-europa Demonstration Conference on Saturday October 15, 2005 at the Naturhistoriska Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. The European Network for Biodiversity Information (ENBI) and Species 2000-europa were organising a joint demonstration conference. Both projects were demonstrate their achievements and the new possibilities and challenges emerging from their work. The WP-11 Poster presented at the meeting is available in the download area.

This conference aimed at the end-users of the software and services developed by these projects. Representatives from government agencies, policy bodies, legislative agencies, scientific institutes, companies and citizens were invited to attend this meeting.