WHO-CEHA Inter-Water Thesaurus and other WHO Sources for Health and Environment Terminology

Mazen MalkawiTechnical Information Officer

WHO/EMRO/CEHA

CEHA• Regional Centre for Environmental Health

Activities• Established in 1985 in Amman, Jordan by the

WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean EMRO

• Its Mandate is to promote Environmental Health through technical support for national capabilities and programmes in the Member Countries of the Region

• For more details http://emro.who.int/ceha

Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR)

Sudan

Egypt

Saudi Arabia

Yemen

Oman

I.R. Iran

Pakistan

Lebanon

Jordan

Syria

UAE

Kuwait

Libya

Morocco

Tunisia

Somalia

Afghanistan

Djibouti

Iraq

BAA

QAT

CEHANET

• Regional Environmental Health Information Network established by CEHA in 1988 in collaboration with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

• Mandate is to improve access to reliable and relevant environmental health information in the Region

CEHANET Approaches

• Regional EH Information Centre and Information Services

• Development of Information Systems and Tools• Production of Regional and National Information• Human Resources Development• Establishment of EH Information Centres• For details http://www.emro.who.int/ceha/cehanet.asp

CEHA Inter-Water Thesaurus• Based on the IRC Inter-water Thesaurus for Community

Water Supply and Sanitation• It is a controlled and structured vocabulary for use in

indexing, storage, and retrieval of information• Bilingual English/Arabic • Includes 2200 descriptors and about 1000 non-descriptors• Based on printed version as mostly its users are small

size information centres that are using CDS/ISIS. • Electronic version is available for larger centres using

Mini-ISIS

Thesaurus Structure• Presentation is alphabetical and incorporating both

descriptors and non-descriptors in one sequence• Each entry (word block) contains all available details

including all relationships• Each block gives the whole hierarchy of the descriptor

both at superordinate and subordinate levels for up to seven levels

• The Arabic equivalent of the top term in the word block is presented

• Subject categories (facets) have also been added to the top term to indicate the term’s affiliation

Thesaurus Subjects• A Water Supply

– A1 Water Resources– A2 Water Treatment

• B Water Quality• C Water Use• D Water and Wastewater Transport• E Sanitation

– E1 Wastewater Treatment– E2 Waste Disposal and Utilization

• F Health– F1 Environment– F2 Food

Thesaurus Relationships

• Equivalence (Synonyms) It indicates that one term from among a number of synonyms has been selected as descriptor while the others are considered non-descriptors

• Hierarchical (Broader and Narrower) Multiple levels have been used to indicate hierarchical levels (4 broader and 4 narrower)

• Related (Associative)

• Scope Notes are added to some descriptors to define, explain or limit the term

Thesaurus Maintenance

• As the thesaurus updating is of utmost importance equal to its construction, CEHA has decided to cooperate with IRC and its Focal Points in the Region on this Regard.

• Users were requested to send their suggestions for addition, deletion or modification to CEHA for centralization of the updating process

• Special form was used for this purpose. There are suggestions for adding about 400 descriptors

Other Supporting Tools

• Subject Analysis Handbook

• CEHANET Procedures Manual

• Training course on EH information Networking

• The above tools were used for training about 100 trainers and 300 users in the Region

Unified Medical Dictionary

• The Unified Medical Dictionary (UMD) is a Multilingual Medical Dictionary (Arabic, English, French, German, Spanish).

• Includes more than 150,000 terms with an update facility

• Available in Printed, on CD-ROM and through Internet http://emro.who.int/umd

• Includes several specialized dictionaries and CEHA is looking for support to finalize its EH one

Medical Subject Headings (MESH)

• It is the system designed and used by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for assigning subject headings to books and journals articles in the medical sciences.

• It is available in Arabic• Looking for Collaborators to expand the

Environmental Health part