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, innovates or standardizes, they need a terminology as a tool for themselves, and a corresponding glossary (one of their work products) that helps them communicate about their work. The group will typically seek to use terms that are already defined earlier, e.g. in a standard. However, they will also typically need a set of terms that are specific to the group, which they then need to define themselves. Several TOIP working groups (WGs) and task forces (TFs) have already expressed this need.
One of the objectives of CTWG is to provide TOIP WGs/TFs with
- a cheap and easy way to define and curate the terms they need as a group, with minimal setup and learning curve.
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- 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 We introduce terms wikis to start all this (the second more nifty part in which e.g. glossaries are generated, will follow later). Terms wikis are simple websites that allow collaborative editing in a browser. They meet the "easy and cheap" criteria, but and 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 (a terminology). In TOIP, these groups typically correspond to working groups WGs or task forcesTFs. Sometimes one group undertakes multiple projects, and each is worthy of its own set of terms terminology. Whenever a set of terms terminology 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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