Similar to a dictionary, a thesaurus lists terms that belong to a specific topic area. In addition to the right spelling, a thesaurus contains information about how a term can be generalized, specialized or expressed differently (synonymes). Thesauri provide a controlled vocabulary that is used, among others, to annotate documents (metadata) and for query-expansion in support of information retrieval.
The Environmental Thesaurus (Umweltthesaurus UMTHES)® contains more than 30.000 environmental terms.