  The paper proposes an approach to transcend multicultural and multilingual
barriers in the use and reuse of geographical data at the European level. The
approach aims at sharing scientific terms in the field of nature conservation
with the goal of assisting different user communities with metadata compilation
and information discovery. A multi-thesauri solution is proposed, based on a
Common Thesaurus Framework for Nature Conservation, where different well-known
Knowledge Organization Systems are assembled and shared. It has been designed
according to semantic web and W3C recommendations employing SKOS standard
models and Linked Data to publish the thesauri as a whole in
machine-understandable format. The outcome is a powerful framework satisfying
the requirements of modularity and openness for further thesaurus extension and
updating, interlinking among thesauri, and exploitability from other systems.
The paper supports the employment of Linked Data to deal with terminologies in
complex domains such as nature conservation and it proposes a hands-on recipe
to publish thesauri in the framework.
