The CIS Thesaurus, printed publication of the ILO/CIS of Geneva, dates back to 1976, is the main tool for the indexing of the documents to be included in the production of the ILO/CIS Bulletin and the electronic database CISDOC. To meet these needs, it was produced in two languages: English and French. Following the use of the first Seventies, the CIS Thesaurus is a mixed tool classification/Thesaurus, including both a tree structure alphabetical code and of cross concept relations.
The project of translation from English into Italian was funded by ISPESL to ARPAT/CEDIF (Florence), who completed the work in 1998 in cooperations with the Laboratorio Thesauri of IFNET (Florence). Beyond the translation of the descriptors, terminology was enriched and the existing 22 classes were redistributed in 12 facets, trying to create a more modern and flexible Thesaurus, avoiding the need to use it as a classified system. The original structure has anyway remained the same in order to garantee the absolute compatibility and correspondence between English and Italian descriptors. The tool, realized for Web by LINK s.r.l., is experimentally published on the Internet, to meet the needs of all those interested in OSH terminology. Even with some lacks, the CIS Thesaurus still represents, in fact, the most authoritative list of descriptors on the subject.