Yurdakul, A.; Schnieder, E.:
Modeling Process of Traffic Safety Terminology with the iglos Software.
10th Annual International Conference on Information Technology and Computer Science, Athens, Greece, May 2014.
New disciplines with a specific terminology develop because of the increasing technical progress. On the whole, this multidisciplinarity effects as well the development of international communication problems between non-professionals and experts of a special field or between experts of different sciences. It becomes usual that technical terms are defined differently in different fields and languages. Therefore, we will present the iglos terminology management system of the Institute for Traffic Safety and Automation Engineering of the Braunschweig University of Technology as a software platform which evolves different methodological approaches for solving lexical and terminological problems between terms of different varieties (technical languages) and languages. First of all, these include classical semantical relation problems as synonymy (relation of words with the same or similar meanings), antonymy (relation of words with the opposite meanings), hypernymy-hyponymy (relation between superordinates and subordinates) and ambiguity (relation of words with several meanings). For example, the German term “Sicherheit” has two meanings and three translations in English, namely “safety”, “security” and “certainty”. Whereas the first two translations define the feeling of being under protection, the third translation describes the assurance. It is the main target of iglos to avoid the multilingual misunderstanding between special languages of different fields by standardising the definitions of technical terms. In our paper, we will treat the semantical differentiation between safety-related terms as “Sicherheit” in German and “safety” and “security” in English with the iglos terminology modeling process as one method for solving linguistic problems. The terminology modeling process generally consists of the following three steps: the extraction of definitions of the terms “safety” and “security” from different sources (e.g. dictionaries and encyclopedia, standards, scientific papers, glossaries etc.), the concrete definition of the terms mentioned above in different varieties and languages with the corresponding source informations and the relating of the terms on the basis of the variety-based iglos sign model with different relation types. Among these relation types, there are for example the risk of confusion (isMixesUpWith), translation (hasTranslation), output (hasOutput, isOutputOf), input (hasInput, isInputOf), holonymy (hasPart, isPartOf), meronymy (isPartOf, hasPart), antonymy (hasAntonym), synonymy (isSynonymOf), polysemy (isPolysemOf) and homonymy (hasHomonym). The important merit of the iglos sign model is to enable the specification of terminologies by avoiding terminological haziness and to create and visualise concrete unobstructedly typable relations between terms in a systematic context (variety). Finally, the multilingual and multidisciplinary communication should be the focus of the sign model.