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 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.
How to use them
- Contact the CTWG on slack at #concepts-and-terminology-wg to get a terms wiki for your group. (If 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 by clicking the green "New Page" button, editing content in markdown, and clicking the green "Save Changes" button when done.
- Edit a term or its definition by browsing to its page and clicking the green "Edit" button. (Again, "Save Changes" when done).
- Learn about how to work with hyperlinks.
- Ask the CTWG on slack at #concepts-and-terminology-wg to help you setup an export of your data to a glossary.
- Understanding the template for a glossary wiki page. <== 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>
Registry of Terms Wikis (and Glossaries)
The CTWG doesn't control or approve terms wikis. However, we do attempt to track them, as a general service to the public. If you have a terms wiki to add, please let us know. Here are terms wikis (and glossaries) we know about:
| Tag and Link | Community | Description | Month Started | Glossary Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #ctwg | Concepts and Terminology Working Group (CTWG) | Terminology for the CTWG tools, terms wiki design, curation, and our own documentation. | May 2021 | |
| #toip-general | the greater TOIP ecosystem | terms used throughout TOIP contexts | May 2021 | |
| #essiflab | eSSIF Lab | ? | ? | ? |
| #ghp | ToIP Interoperability Working Group for Good Health Pass | Global interoperability of health certificates and travel passes with a focus on COVID-19 | April 2021 | 1.0 |
| #sovrin | Sovrin Foundation | Governance and operation of the Sovrin Foundation and Sovrin ledger | January 2017 | 3 |
| #yoma-gf | Yoma Governance Framework WG | July 2021 | ||
Why A Wiki?
This definition of a wiki is from the best know wiki in the world, Wikipedia:
A wiki (/ˈwɪki/ (
listen) WIK-ee) is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
The basic idea of a glossary wiki is simply a wiki whose scope is a specific set of terms defined by a specific glossary community that, taken together, form a glossary for that community.
Why GitHub Wikis?
There are several reasons the CTWG chose GitHub to host our glossary wiki capability:
- GitHub is the standard back-end repository system used by Linux Foundation projects (of which the ToIP Foundation is one).
- GitHub has a built-in wiki capability called using GitHub wikis that can be turned on for any GitHub repo.
- A GitHub repo—and its inherent access control capabilities—provides a standard, widely accessible open source tool for each glossary community to manage its own glossary wiki.
- A GitHub wiki is stored in Markdown documents in GitHub just like all other GitHub documentation and can be accessed and managed programmatically via the GitHub APIs.
- The CTWG is developing tooling, called the ToIP Term tool—that will be able to automatically ingest the contents of glossary wikis that follow the CTWG glossary wiki guidelines into a shared terminology corpus. This is where the CTWG and the participating glossary communities can add value by mapping terms and concepts across different glossary communities in order to increase the overall communication value of the terms to everyone.