Whaddya Call It? All-a-do-about terminology management

"While using multiple terms to describe one thing is common, doing so can lead to product confusion and even compliance issues in the business world. Why you should be worried about terminology management."
By Donald DePalma

"...That’s not to say that big companies don’t worry about terminology. IBM has long employed a terminologist who works with a variety of teams for consistent product representation. The terminologist on staff at medical device manufacturer Medtronic gets involved at the earliest stages of a project, working with the development team to formalize the words used to describe the product they will build. And faced with a proliferation of terms due to mergers and acquisitions, companies like Cisco are actively reviewing their own terminology management futures. Companies such as Oracle, PTC, and Nokia also employ full-time terminologists.

Let’s complicate matters a bit more. Take terminology management one step further, beyond the simple transformations of product documentation in a single market, to a product that is sold in 10 other countries that speak different languages. Those 120 terms that refer to a single product now have the potential of becoming 1,200 terms once translated into those 10 languages. And each one of those translated terms will trickle through the documentation, online help, marketing, advertising, and other collateral information in each of those languages. These downstream uses all lead to the possibility of far more interpretations as creative writers, translators, and transcreators elsewhere in the supply and demand chains for that product.

The bottom line is that formal terminology management benefits companies both within a country and across its global business units. Harvesting, normalizing, and integrating your company and industry terminology into authoring and translation systems will allow you to save money on re-purposed content and translation, improve quality, and increase efficiency. At the same time, more consistent terminology can help you improve safety, compliance, and customer service..."s Read the full article

Knowledge Management of Local / Indigenous Traditions for a Globalized World

The books in the above slide, and following resources may give some sources for reflection on what works and where it works:

Seeking Future Alaska Native PhDs!
by Ray Barnhardt and Oscar Kawagley

Compensating forest-dwelling communities for drug the work of the Healing Forest Conservancy, by K. Moran

Infancy of Tools in the Identification of Native Knowledge, by
Dr. Lalitha Aswath & Rupesh Kumar A.
full article

Resources - Links: Local or Indigenous Knowledge @ Profit From The Application Of New Knowledge Pattern Recognition Research To Your Business: The Kaieteur Institute For Knowledge Management.

Focal Area: Status of Traditional Knowledge, Innovations and Practices

Knowledge Management and Indigenous Knowledge: MS Word file Information and Communication Technologies, Knowledge Management and Indigenous Knowledge: Implications to Livelihood of Communities in Ethiopia, by Lishan Adam, PhD, ICT in Development Researcher, Lishan@ictfd.net

Indigenous knowledge, the library and information service sector, and protocols. Publication Date: 01-JUN-05, Australian Academic & Research Libraries,
Author: Nakata, Martin ; Byrne, Alex ; Nakata, Vicky ; Gardiner, Gabrielle

AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND LIBRARIES PDF file

See on the same shelf:

Vertical and tacit: Multifaith and Knowledge Management in Perspective

Knowledge Management Applications in Multifaith & / or Multicultural Transactions Revisited

Looks Can Be Deceptive: Web Analytics & Transaction Log Demystified

A quote from the book helps visualizing the true figures of a Website's visitors:

"One could legitimately wonder if the counted visits appearing in Table 7-6 can be attributed to actual people or to robots, spiders, crawlers and the likes. Robots are usually small applications designed to gather data for search engine indexes. Unfortunately, the record of a virtual visit by a robot, spider or crawler looks no different in a Web server transaction log than that of a visit by an actual person. Robot visits may be traceable through name identifiers (i.e., Googlebot), or by a high volume of pages accessed in a very small timeframe, or by their requests for a file on the Web site called 'robots.txt.' The latter normally describes what may or may not be indexed from a given Web site by search engines. Nevertheless, if found, visits by robots must be systematically filtered and separately counted or just ignored when assessing the real usage impact of a Web site."

Continue reading this from the book on E-Metrics and the details @ eMetrics or Web-Metrics or Webometrics - A new book for Library & Information Professionals

Which flavour does knowledge have on the web?

In recent debates within the KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki project, the need arose to further refine and find a common understanding of the type of knowledge that is (ideally) managed and processed using (semantic) wikis. One of the proposals evolved around a conceptualization of knowledge put forward by Gabi Reinmann-Rothmeier, also dubbed the “Munich Modell” (Münchner Modell).

In the Munich Modell, knowledge comes in three states of matter: solid (like ice), liquid (like water) and gas (like water vapor).

“Frozen” knowledge is knowledge in its most tangible, manageable form, for instance the type of verified, expert-endorsed information you would find in an encyclopedia like the Encylopedia Britannica.

“Gaseous” knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge in its least consolidated form: think for instance of the type of heated debate you might have with folks in a pub, which is arguably the least structured, most uncontrollable, but also the most engaging type of knowledge!

And the “liquid” form of knowledge, eventually, is the common knowledge of day-to-day-life. It’s probably fair to say that it becomes obvious mostly when in the process of changing its state of matter: When it is calibrated against “frozen” or informational knowledge or when it is debated, becomes “gaseous” knowledge that informs action. (If you’d like to know more about the Munich model and are able to read German, you might want to download the original article here - PDF, 365 KB). continue reading @ The Semantic Puzzle

How do you describe this industry, and what you do, to your family and friends?

Posted by Bryant on September 30, 2008 in Infonomics: Question of the Week
View Discussions
"I don't know about all of you, but describing this industry to those not in it can be . . . interesting. How do you convey what you do?" continue reading

PS: I would call this, if I am asked to, as Information Industry or Knowledge Management.

*Infonomics is a new title of a journal (formerly called AIIM E-DOC Magazine); see also: Knowledge Management - The Next Generation @ TakingAIIM blog

What I Know for Sure...In Information Management

AIIM > Infonomics Magazine September/October 2008, by Joan Moumbleaux*

Extract: "For readers of O, The Oprah Magazine, you will recognize my article title as a riff on the title of her monthly editorials. Oprah’s column ruminates on unchanging truths in a changing world. As I sat reading her recent editorial, I found myself pulling out a list of “lessons learned” that I have created during my 22 year career, and two things happened...

Taxonomy is a sexy word for a subject classification catalog. Historically, the term taxonomy is linked with botanist Linnaeus who used the term to describe his hierarchical classification of things. Remember learning “kingdom, phylum, class…?” During the 1990s consultants began using the term “taxonomy” to describe library science concepts of classification schemes, controlled vocabulary and thesauri. Why?

The word had gravitas. It sounded more science-y and hence more interesting, sexier, to clients. The term has come to mean a polyhierarchical classification scheme representing intellectual relationships between concepts. Let’s face it; that is a subject classification scheme created so that we can catalog information. But no one in IT wants to be called a great cataloger! Did I hear someone say “ontology?” continue reading

*Joan Moumbleaux is the Knowledge Manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries' Restoration Center. She can be reached at 301.713.0174 x207 or joan.moumbleaux@noaa.gov. This article was previously published in “The Capitol Image,” the newsletter of the AIIM National Capitol Chapter.