IITF Colloquium

Aim and scope

Well-functioning terminology management systems are a prerequisite for efficient work in terminology for end-users, content providers and developers alike. Recently, there have been several internationally and nationally coordinated efforts to integrate terminological resources on a wide scale. This includes national termbases in several European countries, terminology portals that provide access to existing termbases distributed across various organisations, and cross-national resources such as IATE. Jointly these resources provide better integration, interoperability, unification and federated access to terminological information. Despite significant standardisation in the field of terminology (most notably ISO 704, 1087, 16642, 26162 and 30042), there have been relatively few attempts to coordinate the development of technology needed for terminology management, including underlying data models developed on the basis of the ISO standards to ensure interoperability and federated access to terminology. So far most projects rely on their own in-house technologies.

This workshop aims to provide a meeting ground for scholars, developers and users who take an interest in terminology management systems and will hopefully facilitate better integration between various initiatives. We adopt a wide perspective on terminology management systems, i.e. computer tools used to represent and maintain terminological information. This includes not only database systems for registering, archiving and accessing terminology, but also a wider set of interconnected tools for exploitation of specialised corpora, candidate term extraction and validation of termhood, tools for ontology building and validation, tools for graphic design, presentation and visualisation of terminology data and concept hierarchies, tools for intelligent browsing, tools for user-friendly presentation of content, etc.