Terminology

Summary

A terminology is a set of terms that are used within a single scope to refer to concepts and other semantic units of a single party (e.g. a community), enabling parties to reason and communicate ideas they have about one or more specific topics. It may be viewed as a topic-specific subset of that party's vocabulary.

As each term in the terminology comes with all sorts of related data, such as a definition, documentation about the semantic unit that it represents, terms that can be used as synonyms, etc., and since (pointers to) all that data is gathered in a single MRG entry, we can also say that a terminology consists of the set of MRG entries that hold such data of the terms that the terminology consists of.

As a consequence, it is easy to generate an MRG for a terminology, as this is basically the collection of the MRG entries that constitute the terminology (apart from some meta-data, of course). And from there, human readable glossaries can be derived.

A terminology may be versioned, i.e. associated with a versiontag. This allows multiple terminologies to exist within a single scope, enabling the scope to have one for specific purposes (e.g. for the further development of its terms, or for use within a whitepaper).

A terminology can be documented by (at most) one machine-readable glossary, from which human readable glossaries can be derived. Selecting the (scoped) terms that are part of a terminology and generating the various glossaries is done by the curator(s) of its scope.

The terminology pattern provides an overview of how this concept fits in with related concepts.

The terminology construction manual describes how to construct a terminology by selecting (groups of) terms, and manipulating such selections.

Purpose

In order for parties to properly reason and/or communicate ideas (concepts and other semantic units) about some topic - in particular when it is a specialist topic - they have to establish a set of terms, the meaning of which should be defined (or otherwise documented) in such a way that the likelihood of misunderstandings between them is minimized. This set of terms is called a **terminology**