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Fig 3: Future ERSAP 
Programme - UNEP or thesaurus of environmental 
terms (English, French, Spanish and Russian), 
the ISPRS dictionary, the PASCAL-GEODE 
thesaurus, the  IBISCUS-CEGET thesaurus for 
generic terms, a multilingual dictionary of 
remote sensing and photogrammetry and other 
thesauri to be identified will be examined and 
screened. A single list of selected terms will 
be provided to form the basis for discussions 
with the experts. One of the main targets will 
be the standardisation and harmonisation of 
nomenclature. To fulfill this task, the 
information to be harmonised will be analysed 
and distributed to all relevant groups who will 
evaluate, contribute and make relevant 
amendments. 
This thesaurus will be part of a Unified Remote 
Sensing, Photogrammetry, and Related 
Applications System, a long term effort to build 
an increasingly intelligent automated system 
that understands the relevant terms and their 
interrelationship and uses this understanding to 
help users to retrieve and organise information 
from a variety of machine-readable sources. 
Meanwhile, Hyperline, the prototype hypertext 
system developed by the Agency will enable ERSAP 
users to interrogate the ERSAP database in their 
natural languages, navigate through the 
multilingual thesaurus structure and browse the 
documents associated with thesaurus terms. 
7.2 The Future ERSAP Information Flow 
In the future ERSAP Information Flow, the 
original documents will be scanned on a high 
performance scanner. Scanned documents will be 
transferred to an optical disk based archiving 
352 
Information Flow 
system. 
In parallel, an OR (Optical Character 
Recognition) /Processing system will enable full 
text search and retrieval combined to 
traditional search capabilities on title, 
summaries, keywords from the ERSAP thesaurus 
etc.. Access to the search capabilities of the 
ESA-IRS will be performed through conventional 
workstations connected to the ESA-IRS Data 
Dissemination Network (DDN) or all the 
interconnected networks. 
However, an interesting option could be 
achieved via workstations with two windows. 
The first window, connected to the computer 
would be used to access the ERSAP database via 
the ESA-QUEST search software. 
The required documents, identified by searching 
the database would be retrieved and displayed in 
the other window. 
The documents could then be ordered online and 
either printed and mailed/faxed, delivered on 
optical media (i.e. CD-ROM etc..) or transmitted 
via traditional communication networks, via the 
emerging ISDN networks or via broadband 
satellite links. 
An example of this process is given in fig. 3.: 
"Future ERSAP Information Flow" 
7.3 The ERSAP Dissemination Products 
From the ERSAP database, ESA-IRS will produce a 
variety of current awareness products and 
services. 
7.3.1 The ERSAP SDIs The Selective 
Dissemination of Information is of particular