button.
Contents:
The CIS Thesaurus |
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The CIS Thesaurus contains the terms used to index documents in CISDOC, the bibliographic database of the International Labour Office's International Occupational Safety and Health Information Centre (CIS). To make it easy to find all the documents that refer to a particular subject, CIS always uses the same words, although the subject may be described in many different ways in different documents. In CISDOC, documents are always described in English and French, and an increasing number are being described in Spanish as well. These descriptions include the index entries, so the CIS Thesaurus is fully trilingual.
The terms that CIS always uses to describe documents are referred to as preferred terms. Alternative terms are also listed in the thesaurus. In the listing by subject in this application, they are grouped under the preferred terms with the label "Used for:". These alternative terms may be true synonyms, such as dimethyl ketone, for which we prefer acetone, or names for things that can be conveniently grouped under a more general heading (e.g. cold galvanizing cross-referred to electroplating). If you are using this thesaurus as an aid to translation, you should be aware that many synonyms are specific to one language, so you will not necessarily find the French or Spanish equivalent of an English "Used for" term if you change the interface language.
To limit the range of meanings of a term, a scope note is used. For example, shops is used to index documents about retail shops, but not automobile repair shops, which are indexed with vehicle repair and servicing, so you will see the note (retail shops) associated with shops.
Because the alphabetical order of terms is different in each language, each set of terms in English, French and Spanish has a unique identifier called a facet that is used to organize the CIS Thesaurus by subject. A facet is a string of letters; facets of geographical entities and organizations begin with a digit. Because the subjects of documents can be very general or very specific, the CIS Thesaurus includes terms of different levels of specificity (e.g., tools and workholding devices > hand tools > hammers). This hierarchy of specificity is reflected in the length of the facet associated with a term (Hl > Hla > Hlam for the three terms in the previous sentence). A term typically has a facet one character longer than the next more general ("broader") term and one character shorter than the next more specific ("narrower") terms. On the highest level are the 33 major categories with one-character facets that you see when this programme is launched. In some cases where a term has more than 26 narrower terms more than one letter may be added on passage from the broader to the narrower term.
Each term can have only one broader term, but may have more than one narrower term(s) (e.g., hand tools has many narrower terms besides hammers, such as screwdrivers and shovels). Besides relationships up and down one branch of the hierarchy of terms, there are relations between terms on different branches. For example, the term organic thiophosphates appears on the inorganic acid esters branch of the organic compounds hierarchy, but several members of this class of compound are or have been used commercially for crop protection, so we indicate that a related term, pesticides, exists on the industrial products hierarchy.
Because a single chemical can have many more or less systematic names, Chemical Abstracts Service Registry Numbers are also listed whenever possible.
The interface |
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The language of the interface can be set to any of the three languages of the thesaurus, English, French or Spanish. The language of the interface determines the language of the data presented in the Navigation and Search frames; any information placed in the editable area of the Bridge Frame before a change of interface language will not be affected by the change.
The possibilities for printing information from the thesaurus depend on the operating system and browser used by your computer. Some suggestions for three popular operating systems are given under Printing below.
Browsing |
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To get back quickly to the top level, you can use the button.
To quickly see the titles of documents in the CISDOC database that have been indexed with the current term, click on the 
button. A separate display window will open on top of the thesaurus application. If there are many titles, they will be displayed on a series of pages. The number of titles per page is determined by the figure in the "Display by" box at the top of the Search Frame. The default number is 10, but you can change it to any value between 1 and 99.
The term that has the focus in the navigation pane, optionally with any "used for" terms, can be transferred to the editable area of the Bridge Frame. See more about that under Working with the results later in this description.
Searching |
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button to start the search.
The search strings should be entered in the Terms with box in the following format:
| Search string | Format | Sample | Hits | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Term (preferred or alternative)
| Complete |
xxxxxxxx |
asbestos |
1 | First part |
xxxxx* |
asbest* |
9 | Any part |
*xxxxx* |
*best* |
14 | Facet
| Complete |
[yyyyy] |
[fuse] |
1 | First part |
[yyyy*] |
[fus*] |
58 | CAS number
| Complete |
CAS nnnnn-nn-n |
CAS 1332-21-4 |
1 | | |||||||||
The search string is not case-sensitive and may be entered without accents even when the language of the interface is set to French or Spanish.
The results of the search (the hit list) are displayed in the lower section of the Search Frame. If you specify only part of a term or facet rather than the entire one, you are likely to get more than one hit, that is, to find more than one term: all the terms containing the string of characters that you entered will be listed. If more than 10 terms are retrieved, they will be displayed in groups of 10. You can change the number of hits displayed at one time by changing the value in the Display by box at the top of the search pane; the maximum value is 99.
The hit list displays facets and the corresponding preferred or alternative terms. Alternative terms are displayed in italics. To view the full CIS Thesaurus record for a term in the navigation pane, including its equivalents in French and Spanish, click on the facet.
To the left of each facet in the hit list there is a check box. You can select/deselect the name by clicking on this checkbox. The purpose of selecting hits is to copy them into the editable area of the Bridge Frame at the bottom right of the interface window. The Bridge Frame is described in Using the results in other applications below.
Terms remain selected only as long as the current page of results is displayed. If you switch to a next/previous portion of the hit list and return to the page where you made your selections, you will find that the selection has been cancelled. To select/deselect all displayed hits, click on the 
or 
buttons respectively.
The button cancels the last search and deletes the hit list.
Printing |
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Using the results in other applications |
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Terms can be collected in the editable area of the Bridge Frame as follows:
button on the Capture line
button
button
Depending on the use to be made of the captured items, they can be inserted in different formats:
The 
button will copy the contents of the editing window to the clipboard (Microsoft Windows only); you can also highlight text and copy it to the clipboard with the appropriate keyboard or mouse operation for your operating system.
About the program |
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This is Version 1.2 of the CISTHES user interface. When Version 1 of the CISDOC search interface had become operational, both applications were modified to match their functionality with each other. Changes in the CISTHES interface were less substantial than those of the CISDOC search. The most important improvement is probably the display of the results of the function, where the complete CISDOC functionality has been implemented.
The people behind the program |
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The structure and content of the CIS Thesaurus database has been developed by CIS, the International Occupational Safety and Health Information Centre. The concept and design of the interface has been worked out by CIS as well, based on the experience with earlier interfaces of the same Thesaurus.
The program of the interface has been developed by Arcanum Development Ltd. The company, established in 1994, specializes in the fields of
Based in Budapest, Hungary, Arcanum Development works with many international organizations and national intellectual property offices. See further information on the company at http://www.arcanum.com
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