TL;DR: This user guide is not a quick fix for creating a glossary. Rather, it provides you with guidance that will help you to understand the concepts/ideas of others, in the same way as it helps others to correctly understand yours. And that takes some more effort.
Understanding each other is one of the most basic and pervasive problems there is between people, the more so as they come from different backgrounds. Many cultures have stories that show they know this. Knowing there is a problem is a good start, but it must be followed by knowing how this can be dealt with, which in turn should be followed by people actually dealing with it.
CTWG is tasked to enable ToIP participants (people working in/with working groups (WGs) and task forces (TFs), and others) to come to grips with this problem, by providing means and mechanisms that have proved to be helpful (when actually used).
This guide:
- explains the ideas (concepts) behind creating and maintaining a terminology for some purpose;
- describes how a governing party (Working Group, Task Force, other group) can:
- curate (i.e.: create and maintain) its required terminology in its own terms wiki;
- produce a glossary of the terms it maintains in its terms wiki and optionally include terms from other terms wikis.
- explains how an authoring party can create a deliverable (specification, recommendation, white paper, website, etc.) that can either:
- include a glossary of the terms needed within that scope, and/or
- include permalinks to terms within that integrated glossary, to an external glossary, or directly to terms defined on terms wikis.
- is itself an example of what is described under points 1, 2 and 3, to which end it includes the ToIP Concepts and Terminology Glossary.
A first idea that helps us to come to grips with terminological problems is to note that we do not need everyone to understand everything that others say. We postulate that we can limit any solution to a scope within which individuals somehow pursue a set of (shared) objectives, as this intrinsically motivates them to want to really understand each other, and we rely on such a motivation for the resolution of any issues.
ToIP WGs and TFs are typical examples of groups of people pursuing a set of (shared) objectives, and hence qualify as a [scope](scope) for our purposes. If they pursue multiple sets of objectives, they may declare multiple such scopes, in each of which they could then create and maintain the terminology they need and use for realizing these objectives. Of course, any other group of people could do this if they choose to - this way of working isn't limited to ToIP WGs/TFs.
A second idea is the actual and consistent realization of the difference between (intangible) information, i.e. the ideas and concepts that people have in their heads but you cannot find when opening it up, and (tangible) data, i.e. the words, phrases, symbols, audio/video, bit strings etc., that represent such ideas in various ways. For our purposes, we limit data to words and phrases, terms that represent ideas/concepts. We will use the term party to generically refer to anyone or anything that has a (subjective) knowledge or 'mind', i.e. a chunk of information, that it manages by learning, reasoning, changing its 'mind', making decisions etc. People and organizations are the prototypical examples of what we call parties.
A third idea is that of semantics, which is a collection of terms and concepts where each term is associated with a specific concept (and vice versa). A semantics allows a party to express its ideas as words and phrases. It also allows a party to interpret words and phrases that it hears or reads, turning the message in information in its mind to make sense of it. Parties typically use different semantics in different contexts (for example, when talking to a child you might use different words than when you would convey the same message to an adult). Also, these different semantics will change over time (e.g. as they learn/change their minds).
The problem we need to address is that in a specific context (a scope), we need people that each have their own, subjective knowledge/information, to utter and interpret data (terms) such that every party uses a semantics that is sufficiently 'the same' for understanding one another (having the same information in everyone's minds). This is possible because people can change their semantics and use them in a particular context. And if they want to work with others, to pursue some shared objectives, then that will motivate them to actually do this, and spend time to coordinate their semantics.
A (coordinated) semantics can be documented in a glossary. Creating and maintaining a coordinated semantics is a process that is described in this document, that presents a practical method for establishing and maintaining terminology that is unambiguous and relevant for a given scope or purpose, and resolving related issues.
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