CESSDAThe European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is one of the most comprehensive multilingual vocabularies available for the social sciences in Europe. Developed and maintained by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA), it plays a central role in enabling cross-border data discovery and access across European research data infrastructures.
Background
ELSST evolved from the Humanities and Social Sciences Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET), originally developed by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex. The project to create a multilingual European version began around 2000, driven by the need for consistent subject indexing across the growing network of European social science data archives. The thesaurus has undergone significant development since its initial release as Version 1 in November 2020, with regular updates adding languages, refining concepts, and expanding coverage. The current Version 6 was released in November 2025.
Purpose & Scope
ELSST is designed for data discovery within the CESSDA infrastructure, enabling researchers to find datasets across European archives regardless of the language in which data were originally described. Its over 3,400 concepts cover the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology, and environmental science.
Multilingual Coverage
ELSST is available in 15 languages, with translations contributed by national institutions across Europe:
| Language | Contributing Institution |
|---|---|
| Czech | Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences |
| Dutch | Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) |
| English | University of Essex |
| Finnish | Tampere University Foundation |
| French | FORS (Switzerland) |
| German | GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences |
| Greek | National Centre for Social Research |
| Hungarian | Centre for Social Sciences (TK KDK) |
| Icelandic | DATICE |
| Lithuanian | Kaunas University of Technology |
| Norwegian | Sikt |
| Romanian | Romanian Social Data Archive |
| Slovenian | University of Ljubljana |
| Spanish | (contributed under CC-BY-SA 4.0) |
| Swedish | Swedish National Data Service |
Serializations & Technical Formats
ELSST is published as a SKOS concept scheme. The thesaurus is assigned the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13843400, ensuring persistent identification and citability. Detailed structural documentation, including a bibliography of definition sources, is available through the ELSST website.
Governance & Maintenance
ELSST is owned and published by CESSDA and its national Service Providers. The thesaurus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Updates are coordinated across the contributing institutions, with new versions released on a roughly annual cycle. An inclusivity statement and feedback mechanism are provided on the website.
Notable Implementations
ELSST is the primary discovery vocabulary used within the CESSDA Data Catalogue and by individual CESSDA Service Providers across Europe. It enables multilingual search across national data archives, allowing a researcher in Finland to discover datasets catalogued in German or Spanish, for example. The thesaurus is also referenced by social science data management and curation workflows.
Related Standards
ELSST is closely related to HASSET, from which it evolved, and complements other social science classification systems. Within the CESSDA ecosystem, it works alongside other CESSDA tools and services for data documentation and discovery.