When you are creating a new product, you are often asked what it does - what is it for? My enthusiastic explanation would inevitably be received with a "Huh?", which made me realize that The Terminologist fills a bit of a niche gap. While I do believe it would be useful for anybody, it really comes into its own in large and complicated projects. This article is to explain...
How much time is spent undoing the damage done by even a single misunderstanding of a term? Not even to speak of the time wasted on that misunderstanding in the first place...
The Terminoligist exists to help you make sense of all the terms and definitions that you are faced with in a project. It attempts to capture real-life uses, with all of its ambiguity and vagueness, and provide you and your team with the tools to organize it and establish better terminology for the project as a whole.
I realize that, unless you've been in a situation where a single misunderstanding of an ambiguous term has caused a lot of damage, you might not quite get it. Perhaps the best explanation is an example. This example is slightly contrived, but it is not too unrealistic. Let's say that I create a Project in The Terminologist called "My Life", and I want to use it document everything that is part of my life. I might create a System, called "Living" that sets a context for all my every-day stuff, like food, clothing, furniture, etc. Now, let's say that I am from England, and I love jumpers and therefore have a lot of them, so I create a Term for "Jumper" in my "Living" system, with the folowing Definition:
A knitted top-garment intended to keep me warm and cozy.
Now, let's say I am currently living in the US and know that a Jumper is called a Sweater here, so I add another Term - "Sweater" - to the "Living" system and make it another term for the same definition.
We have two beautiful, er, handsome young boys in the house that suddenly decide they want a pet frog. We go to the pet store and get a particularly active one. As we're driving home, discussing what we'll call the newest member of our family, our youngest explaims "Jumper! Call him Jumper!" It seems like a logical name, so he is thus named. The next day we are doing laundry, and I explain to my youngest - in pretty basic English - to "put jumper in laundry". What, to my surprise, would I find in the laundry basket an hour later? A dilema introduced by some careless terminology! That's what it is. So, I go to The Terminologist, find the term "Jumper", and add a new definition:
Our new pet frog, of the Conraua Goliath variety.
Now we have a the term "Jumper" mean two different things. The Terminologist will make it known to you that this is Ambiguous, but we already know that, right? How do we fix it? Well, since the knitted garment has another widely used term (at least in the locality we currently find ourselves), we could decide to exclusively refer to knitted garments as "Sweaters". In The Terminologist we set the Usage of Jumper, defined as a knitted garment, to "Deprecated", and leave the Usage of Jumper, defined as out pet frog, as "Canonical". This leaves Sweater as the Canonical term for a knitted garment. Now we are back on track!
The above example could go on: I might work in the police force, where the term Jumper might also be used for someone practicing parkour where they're not supposed to, or even someone that is about to commit suicide.
Few people would be interested in documenting their lives in this way, but it does serve to show how terms can be confusing and could even lead to some trouble. When you are involved in sizeable projects, with many employees - old and new, and consultants, keeping everything straight can be hard, and that is what The Terminologist aims to be of service.
Feel free to join the My Life - Example Project to see the above example in action.