Finnish Veterinary Terminology: translating medical and veterinary subject headings using collaborative process

Aim

Viikki Campus Library is responsible of the animal health information services in Finland. It started a network consisting of veterinary, medical and linguistic specialists to collaborate in translating veterinary entries in medical thesauri, i.e. FinMeSH. The Library is using its interface Termix to index veterinary books, articles and other material in its databases. Lack of accreditation of the veterinary terms has prohibited the development of ontology projects.

Methods

The Library initiated two meetings in autumn 2011 to discuss the future project. Veterinary authorities, members of the Faculty and the Finnish Veterinary association, information specialists and other interested in translation and linguistics gathered to start planning and forming the network. Without collaboration of as many as possible interesting groups this kind of project would be impossible.
The core of the work is to translate MeSH and other thesauri into Finnish – a language with no structural relations to Indo-European languages such as English, German or French. A consistent, systematic and relatively long tradition of translating medical entries into Finnish is in the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim. Its publications anchor the new medical terms into Finnish language. Outcomes of this work are e.g. Lääketieteen termit and the database FinMeSH, which is used through the interface Termix, created and maintained by Terkko, the medical library.
When the semantical part of the work is reliably done, then it is possible to create user-friendly applications using ontology as means. The ONKI service contains Finnish and international ontologies, vocabularies and thesauri needed for publishing on the Semantic Web.

Results

High quality ontological service will be created based on deep expertise of the veterinary profession and research. User friendly interfaces will upgrade the open access services provided by the University, when self indexing is made easier. Several thesauri as Agriforest, YSA and FinMeSH are the tools that both librarians and veterinarians apply in their daily work in producing, delivering and searching new information.

Discussion

Collaborative network discussing new entries is and ideal tool, but finding right people and motivating them into a voluntary work is not an easy task for the library.

Conclusions

Collaborative development of terminology is a fruitful way of improving the quality of thesauri.