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The systematic organization and definition of concepts as well as the administration of the concept representations is called terminology management. Increasingly private industry as well as public administration – not to mention big organizations in the third sector – are applying terminology management methods and systems.
Terminology standardization can be subdivided into two distinct – yet complementary - types of standardizing activities:
- Standardization of terminologies
- Standardization of terminological principles and methods
Nearly every technical body in standardization must standardize its terminology. Thousands of organizations beyond standardization are unifying their terminology on a larger or smaller scale. Many international, regional or national authorities harmonize terminologies, if existing unified or standardized terminologies conflict with each other.
There is a terminology component to virtually all standardization and harmonization activities. You cannot regulate what may be not understood, i.e. what is not defined.
ISO/TC 37 “Terminology and other language and content resources” standardizes basic principles, requirements and methods concerning the management of terminology and as well as resources for language technology and content resourcesstructured content. More information in: ISO/TC 37 N 489 (follows soon): www.iso.org/tc37.
ISO/TC 37 standards are based on a number of assumptions based from science theory and referring to:
- Concepts
- Objects
- Representations
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» objects1
things, such as organisms, creatures, events, processes, phenomena of the real world and conceived objects
» concepts2
mental abstractions corresponding to objects1
» representations3
verbal and non-verbal representations of concepts² (e.g. terms or other kinds of designations for denoting concepts2,definitions or other kinds of explanations for describing concepts, i.e. graphical symbols, pictures, diagrams, sounds, motions, etc.) |
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