Abstract
Multilinguality is an important aspect for the creation of public services in countries like
Spain, with four official languages (Spanish, Catalonian, Basque and Galician), and overall, if
these services are aimed for a European audience with a big number of official languages. Thus, an
initiative for creating a catalog service at the Spanish or at the European level must take into
account the necessity of supporting metadata written in a variety of languages. When a user
submits a query request to a catalog, (s)he should obtain the data resources that verify the
restriction specified by the user and with independence of the language used in the metadata
records describing these resources. Our R&D group has developed a strategy for managing these
multilingual metadata aspects that face up the problem from three points of view: the use of
multilingual controlled lists, the use of multilingual and interrelated thesauri, and the word sense
disambiguation of large text descriptive elements. These three substrategies, integrated within a
catalog server, are being currently tested in several spatial data infrastructure projects.
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