European Language Social Science Thesaurus

"The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. It is owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and its national Service Providers. The thesaurus consists of over 3,300 concepts and covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology, and environmental science.

ELSST is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary.

ELSST is currently available in 16 languages: Danish, Dutch, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.

ELSST employs the usual range of terms and thesaural relationships: preferred terms and non-preferred terms (entry terms); the hierarchical relationships (broader concepts (BTs) and narrower concepts (NTs)); and the associative relationship/related concepts (RTs). Definitions are used to define the intended meaning and usage of the preferred term within the domain of the thesaurus. Its main aim is to facilitate access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language and vocabulary. ELSST is used to aid retrieval in the multinational CESSDA data portal."