Terms identification and recognition

Criteria

• Terms that are constitutive of the IAM body of knowledge (e.g. digital identity) or that are relevant in the IAM field

• Terms that represent a distinct concept

• Terms related to proprietary technologies or products that are sufficiently widespread (e.g. AD) or are of particular IAM interest

Proprietary terms

The inclusion or exclusion of proprietary terms in the dictionary led to an interesting dilemma. On one hand we wish the dictionary to be generic, brand and product agnostic. On the other hand, some proprietary technologies such as Active Directory are so widespread and of such practical great importance for field professionals that excluding them from the dictionary would limit the practicability of the dictionary to an important extent. In conclusion we decide to use common sense in how the third criterium above will be applied.

Objectives

• Provide clear and synthetic definitions for field terms

• Provide transparency on the term recognition process by supporting definitions with quotes

Principles

• The lexicographic work should be as “neutral” as possible, inferring terms and definitions from the corpus

• Nevetheless, the outcome becomes normative / prescriptive as one of the objectives of this work is to help speakers by providing them with precise definitions

• For instance, the non-specialist will tend to use specialized terms in a loose way and this is what this dictionary wishes to “fight”, by helping speakers acquire a sufficient understanding of the specialized terms

Languages

For the sake of simplicity, the TOME dictionary starts as a monolingual English dictionary.

If the need arises and depending on the support the TOME project will obtain from the community, language extensions may be considered to provide both translations of terms and translations of definitions in other languages. If such would become the case, English would probably be used as the pivot language.

Cultural Dependency

The kind of cultural dependency of a dictionary is crucial. Law terms, for instance, are culturally dependent because the same terms will have different legal definitions in different jurisdictions. Physical terms, on the other hand, are culturally independent in that the definition of an atom is identicial in all regions of the world (Humbley, 2017, p. 321).

The TOME dictionary will generally aim towards cultural independency. As much of its material is afferent to computer science, it is implied that computer science is culturally independent. Nevertheless, some terms, for instance related to data privacy, may be culturally dependent. Hence, TOME will contain culturally dependent terms. In such instances, the definitions should provide clear indications.

Phraseologisms

Composed terms that may be considered phraseologisms in a non-specialized dictionary (e.g. mutual authentication) must be covered by dedicated dictionary entries as they represent separate concepts. Cross links must be provided between the generic terms (e.g. authentication) and the specialized term (e.g. mutual authentication).

Related Pages

• Term (Dictionary Entry)