A common query interface for multilingual document retrieval from databases of the European Community Institutions

摘要

The move to a single market for the members of the European Community (EC) has provided a focus for efforts that are intended to overcome the barriers of language, especially in the workings of the European Community Institutions. The storage and retrieval of documents is of vital importance to the workings of these Institutions. This paper presents EuroMenUSE, a PC-based front-end system developed to improve access to EPOQUE, the major document database of the European Parliament. EuroMenUSE is an exemplar and the first commercial product to result from the application of the Multilingual MenUSE software shell; in this system it uses the EUROVOC thesaurus. This Common Query Interface replaces the Common Command Language and provides a more effective way for end-users to access document databases.