Poster on a terminology server for cooperative terminology work

A terminology represents the comprehensive list of concepts used in a particular subject area, their definitions, and terms viz. the names used in order to denote the concepts in a given language. Terminology work includes the creation and maintenance of terminologies. Our goal has been to provide a method to construct terminologies as ontological foundations for integrating information systems as postulated in (Wand and Yang, 1996). Common terminologies are crucial for cooperation, both for cooperative information systems and human teams. We have constructed a terminology server based on a meta model that integrates the various perspectives of terminology work, namely expert, domain, terminology structure, and terminology work process. These perspectives serve as foundations for models whose instantiations can be adapted to specific application contexts. In setting up a terminology work application, users can select models which are then instantiated, adapted and combined in a component ware-like fashion. The meta model, the models, their instantiations, and the actual terminology data are formulated in Telos, a knowledge representation language that integrates frame-like concept descriptions and deductive database elements, and stored in ConceptBase, a deductive meta data management system.