A MEA is a Multilalteral Environmental Agreement, typically an international treaty on some environmental issue, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), or the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS). The many MEAs currently in place, are carrying on an initiative called InforMEA aimed at harvesting all documents produced by the governing bodies of MEAs, as well as the reports produced by the secretariats of the various Environmental Agreements. This initiative is facilitated by UNEP, the UN Environmental Programme.

The last InforMEA meeting (Montreux, June 5-6) was focused on semantic standards for environmental glossaries and thesauri. During the meeting, the group discussed the use of thesauri for information management and their application in the context of online learning system. UNEP is already using GEMET for its service UNEP Live, which provides access to data and documents related to the environment, and the proposal is not to extend GEMET with the terminology needed by InforMEA. FAO was invited to present AGROVOC and the work carried out by the AIMS team on semantic standards for data interoperability. The fact that AGROVOC and GEMET are already linked to one another (see: http://aims.fao.org/node/16917/) opens up various possibilities for information exchange among the involved organizations. More to come…