A group of scientists working on rainforest ecosystem in French Guyana have gathered in a scientific complex named Silvolab. Within the framework of this regional co-operation programme, a project named OYAPOQUE has been launched with two purposes: to provide a searchable database of grey literature with abstracts in French or Portuguese on the World Wide Web; and to create a →glossary of forestry →terms with French and Portuguese access as an on-line resource for the users of the literature database.
The work is distributed among three Brazilian teams (INPA in Manaus, EMBRAPA and MUSEU GOELDI in Belem) and a French team (Silvolab, Kourou).
A database has been developed under Access^®, which includes windows and pop-up menus. An English-Portuguese →vocabulary of 2,000 →terms is used as a basic corpus. The translation of the →terms and their →definitions are looked up in the most common French and Portuguese text and reference books and are included in the database for further comparison and evaluation.
At this stage of the project it is important for us to make a first test of the database, assemble the information collected by the different teams and make them available at a single Web site.