Experience with a cross-disciplinary aggregated glossary of technical terms
Joseph J. Ekstrom · 2012
A glossary typically provides a binding of terminology to concepts specific to a particular document or specialty. What would an aggregation of these concept descriptions reveal about how specialists in various fields use terminology? In particular would it help students and educators understand how terminology is used by specialists with whom they need to communicate? This paper provides a status report on an effort to find out. Starting with ISO/IEC 24765: Systems and software engineering vocabulary which aggregated the glossaries from 120 standards, we have created a database of 131 glossaries gathered from various sources. Though only 4% of terms have 3 or more concept descriptions, some have 10 or more. Initial analysis indicates that such a glossary can provide useful insights into potential areas of miscommunication. Simple exposure to the diversity of concepts associated with a given term will help sensitize people to the issues.