Thesaurus for the social sciences

The Thesaurus for the Social Sciences (Thesaurus Sozialwissenschaften) is a crucial instrument for the content-oriented search by keywords in SOFIS and SOLIS. The list of keywords contains about 11,600 entries, of which more than 7,750 are descriptors (authorised keywords) and about 3,850 non-descriptors. Topics in all of the social science disciplines are included.

In printed format we offer following editions of the thesaurus:

German Vocabulary: alphabetical and systematic section (Edition 2005)
German - English (Edition 2006)
English - German (Edition 2006)

The Thesaurus Sozialwissenschaften (Thesaurus for the Social Sciences) is also available in electronic form. In addition, structured files with complete relationships in German and English can be acquired for further processing on your own system. The following versions are available:

Alphabetical list of German vocabulary
Alphabetical list in German and English
Structured files containing alphabetically-sorted descriptors and non-descriptors with relationships in German
Structured files containing alphabetically-sorted descriptors and non-descriptors with relationships in German and English

This trilingual Thesaurus is the result of a joint project carried out over a number of years by GESIS and INION RAdW (Moscow).

German - English - Russian
Russian - German - English

The aim was to overcome the linguistic barriers to efficient searches in German and Russian databases, and to further the exchange of information between the East and the West. The Thesaurus was translated into Russian; thereafter, the Russian topics terms in the social-science-relevant databases of the INION databases ECON (economics and demography), HISTORY (history, ethnography, archaeology), PHILOS (philosophy and sociology) as well as STATE and LAW (jurisprudence and political science) - were investigated and expanded for searches.

[Order form in German]

Contact:
Hannelore Schott; Tel. (0228) 2281-162

Thesaurus for the Social Sciences as SKOS-Version

The Thesaurus for the Social Sciences (German - English) is now available in SKOS-format. The current release is version 0.5, which also uses SKOS-XL and additionally defined extensions. Further technical enhancements and content updates are planned for the future. A detailed documentation about the conversion of the thesaurus to a first experimental SKOS version can be found in the GESIS technical report 2009/07.

A visual representation of the SKOS-thesaurus as network graph which allows easy browsing through the terms is available with the Visual Terminology Browser.

The SKOS version of the Thesaurus for the Social Sciences is available as a downloadable dump file in RDF/XML format (see the form below) and via a SPARQL endpoint.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. York Sure; Tel. (0228) 2281-145

For Downloading the SKOS version, please fill out the form!

The SKOS version of the Thesaurus for the Social Sciences is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany License.

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