Why concept system?
The philosophy of terminology management inspired by ISO 704.
Let’s call any unit of our understanding a concept.
To share knowledge with others, we come up with verbal definitions of our concepts.
To make referring to a concept easier, we map it to a succint representation. In ISO 704, it is called a designation.
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Note
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Words, phrases, abbreviations, math notation or other graphic symbols—both verbal and non-verbal designations can be used to refer to concepts. |
As we share knowledge, it may turn out that:
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Someone else has independently thought of the same concept, and gave it a different term.
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The same term can mean another concept to someone else.
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Same designation can map to different concepts in different fields of knowledge.
As a consequence,
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a single unit of understanding can have more than one verbal/graphical designation,
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the same word, phrase or symbol can be used to refer more than one concept.
This may be especially inconvenient in standards and other technical documentation, where even subtle ambiguities in interpretation may cause trouble.
To make sure everyone is on the same page, we may want to establish a concept system (ISO 704).
A concept system would, for example,
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track how designations map to concepts in a given field of knowledge,
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mark which designations are preferred,
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ensure that a given word or symbol is not used as preferred designation on more than one concept,
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track how concepts relate to each other.
Glossarist offers an approach to managing such a system.