Should Terminology Principles be re-examined?

Operationalization of terminology for IT applications has revived the Wusterian approach. The conceptual dimension once more prevails after taking back seat to specialised lexicography. This is demonstrated by the emergence of ontology in terminology. While the Terminology Principles as defined in Felber manual and the ISO standards remain at the core of traditional terminology, their computational implementation raises some issues. In this article, while reiterating their importance, we will be re-examining these Principles from a dual perspective: that of logic in the mathematical sense of the term and that of epistemology as in the theory of knowledge. We will thus be clarifying and describing some of them so as to take into account advances in knowledge engineering (ontology) and formal systems (logic). The notion of ontoterminology, terminology whose conceptual system is a formal ontology, results from this approach.

Dire n'est pas concevoir

The conceptual modelling built from text is rarely an ontology. As a matter of fact, such a conceptualization is corpus-dependent and does not offer the main properties we expect from ontology. Furthermore, ontology extracted from text in general does not match ontology defined by expert using a formal language. It is not surprising since ontology is an extra-linguistic conceptualization whereas knowledge extracted from text is the concern of textual linguistics. Incompleteness of text and using rhetorical figures, like ellipsis, modify the perception of the conceptualization we may have. Ontological knowledge, which is necessary for text understanding, is not in general embedded into documents.

Le terme et le concept : fondements d'une ontoterminologie

Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in relation to the domain's conceptualization. And as domain knowledge is mainly conveyed through scientific and technical texts, we can hope to extract some useful information from them for building ontology. But is it as simple as this? In this article we shall see that the lexical structure, i.e. the network of words linked by linguistic relationships, does not necessarily match the domain conceptualization. We have to bear in mind that writing documents is the concern of textual linguistics, of which one of the principles is the incompleteness of text, whereas building ontology - viewed as task-independent knowledge - is concerned with conceptualization based on formal and not natural languages. Nevertheless, the famous Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, concerning the interdependence of thought and language, is also applicable to formal languages. This means that the way an ontology is built and a concept is defined depends directly on the formal language which is used; and the results will not be the same. The introduction of the notion of ontoterminology allows to take into account epistemological principles for formal ontology building.