EUtopics: Increase Mutual European Understanding With Language Technology
Terminology-enhanced, multilingual access to open and commercial information and data sources about Europe and the EU
Dear Readers, Dear Friends,
EUROPE IS REALLY GREAT!
No Borders – observation everywhere, common money – different economies, overall justice – huge administration, large landscapes – centralized structures. Europe is great – in its differences. And so it should be. The world has become so complex, that there are no simple or single answers to all questions of mankind. In a complex world – it becomes increasingly important to communicate with each other. Language can be a barrier, if it comes to transnational cooperation. EUtopics.eu is made to use community intelligence enhanced by computerized language technology to “tear down the barriers between the many voices of Europe”.
EUtopics: Terminology driven access to EU resources
EUtopics’ use of the EuroVoc Thesaurus
EUtopics.eu uses is a web application that uses the EuroVoc Thesaurus in all 23 EU-languages for terminology enhanced access to different electronic information sources on the internet. In this way EUtopics creates a dynamic mashup from user interaction with the multilingual, multidisciplinary thesaurus covering the activities of the EU, the European Parliament. EuroVoc is used by the EU administration to categorize all documents which are published by EU institutions.
Access to legal EU-Information on EurLex via EUtopics
EUR-Lex is the official digital publication platform of the EU. All official documents of the EU are indexed with EuroVoc and they are published via EUR-Lex. In fact, EUR-Lex is a large bibliographical database which contains all legally relevant information about the EU. EUR-Lex is open data. Everyone is free to access EU information on the EUR-Lex via a complex user interface on the EUR-Lex website. While EUR-Lex is always the reference, EUtopics, through its active use of terminology, makes it much easier to access this information.
The European Heritage on Europeana, uncovered by EUtopics
Europeana is a meta-interface to “digital resources of Europe’s galleries, museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections”. It links to approx. 25 Mio. documents shared by European publishers and libraries. EUtopics reveals especially those documents in Europeana which are related to EuroVoc terms.
EU and Europe in the Media: News, Web, Images and Videos on Bing searched by controlled terms
Feeding search engines with free-text words is by far not the best way to find relevant information in the internet. Experts use special terminology to name, describe and explain their topics. That for it is better to use the language of the experts to find info4rmation they created for their users. EUtopics.eu uses terms from a specialized terminology, the EuroVoc thesaurus as search terms for information retrieval on the internet. By using the “right words” the precision of search results dramatically increases. In this way, times for searching “the needle in the haystack” on “bubble-biased-search engines” are minimized. Relevant information is found reliably.
EUtopics – alternative ranking of search results through interactive user rating
In short, the page rank of search results of the 2 major search engines Google and Bing for a long time largely related to the number of backlinks and the relevance of the backlinking site.Not long ago, this behavior of search engines was changed by their operators. Today, search engines try to deliver search results that are calculated to fit best to the computed interests of the users.In this case it is deliberately customizable (programmable) machines that deliver the search results. May, be users will not be shown the really best search result, but those results ,which yield the best profit for the search engine itself through featuring of own products and services or those from related businesses. In this sense “word-of-mouth” gains new attraction. “I’d rather buy a product that is recommended to me by a personal friend, than buying a product from an unknown seller. I’d also rather follow a story which is confirmed by a friend, than reading any …. typed into a semi-automatic word processor by someone unknown. ” EUtopics allows users to rank any search result found on the platform. In this way, a “recommendation network of trust” will drive users directly to information they really seeked for.
EUtopics – personal
EUtopics.eu is a one-man project. I wanted to start this project already about 10 years ago. That was the time when ordered my first copy of EuroVoc on a CD. After filing and sending lengthy paper-documents to the EU publication office in Luxembourg, I got an officially looking envelope with the CD and a short notice with other-than-clear copyright information.I shortly looked into the CD, screened the files and I saw, they (the files) were large, with sequences of characters in different charsets. It looked other than trivial to handle this corpus. The CD went into the bottom drawer and it remained there for long… But the idea was always there: Use the EuroVoc-Thesaurus in all its languages as an access tool for EU-related information. It was a logical idea – and it had not been realized by nobody. So I finally started – this project!
Hey Users!
Please visit eutopics.eu, click around, surf the contents, browse the EuroVoc thesaurus, use different languages to find information from other European countries. Comment items, send me feedback, tell your friends…
feedback on feedback@eutopics.eu
