Terms are words or phrases that act as labels for formally defined concepts. "MRI" is a medical term. "Habeas corpus" is a legal term... Any time a group of experts invents or standarizes, terms and their definitions are an important tool as well as a work product.
We could manage terms in lots of ways – everything from writing them down on post-it notes to putting them in a spreadsheet to recording them in fancy professional terminology databases. Here at TOIP, we want something cheap and easy, with minimal setup and learning curve. Yet we want some fanciness, too – the ability to formally release and version glossaries, a way to see how terms are related, a way to attribute sources, a way to reference terms from other places...
Our answer to this tension is terms wikis. These are simple websites that allow collaborative editing in a browser. They meets meet the "easy and cheap" criteria, but allows some sophisticated features under the hood. Think Google Docs, but with slightly more structure – or Wikipedia, but a whole lot simpler. You can learn how to use them in 5 minutes.
A terms wiki is owned by a any community of interest or a community of practice that needs precise alignment about its mental models and the words that describe them. In TOIP, these groups typically correspond to working groups or task forces. Sometimes one group undertakes multiple projects, and each is worthy of its own set of terms. Whenever a set of terms is internally cohesive and managed by a crisply delineated set of stakeholders, we call the context in which it lives a scope. Each scope needs its own terms wiki.
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- Contact the CTWG on slack at #concepts-and-terminology-wg to get a terms wiki for your group. (If you are not a TOIP group, your group is not within TOIP, that's fine; see these instructions instead.)
- Understand how your terms wiki is structured.
- Add a new term and its definition using this workflow.
- Edit a term or its definition using this workflow.
- Work with hyperlinks.
- Request that your data be exported to a glossary.
- (Nicky's suggestion: workflow))
- How to start a new glossary wiki for your glossary community. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
- Understanding the template for a glossary wiki page. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
- How to insert links into glossary wiki pages (or any document you write). <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
- How your glossary wiki works with the CTWG ToIP Term tool. <== THIS PAGE TO BE DEVELOPED BY CTWG VOLUNTEERS
- <insert additional glossary wiki documentation pages here>
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