About
About the UNESCO Thesaurus
The UNESCO Thesaurus is a controlled and structured list of concepts used in subject analysis and retrieval of documents and publications in the fields of education, culture, natural sciences, social and human sciences, communication and information.
Continuously expanded and updated since its first edition in English (1977), the Thesaurus has been translated into French and Spanish (1983–1984). A second revised version was released in 1995. Russian was added in 2005 and Arabic in 2020. Concepts are organized into 7 broad subject areas subdivided into 72 microthesauri, compliant with the ISO 25964 standard for thesaurus construction.
The Thesaurus is primarily used for indexing and retrieving documents in UNESDOC, UNESCO's digital library.
Use, Share, Contribute
The UNESCO Thesaurus is published as a SKOS dataset available according to the Linked Open Data principles. Each concept has a permanent, dereferenceable URI that can be used by any system for interoperability.
It is available for download in various formats and accessible through a SPARQL endpoint. Previous versions are available upon request.
Access & Download
Download (Linked Data)
Related Resources
- UNESDOC Digital Library — UNESCO's document repository, indexed using the Thesaurus
- UNTERM — The official multilingual terminology portal of the United Nations
- data.unesco.org — UNESCO's open data portal
License
The UNESCO Thesaurus is published under open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO) license.
Feedback
Contributions and corrections are welcome. Please use the feedback form.
Skosmos version 3.2