Terminology development and organization in multi-community environments: The case of statistical information.

Abstract

It is becoming commonplace to worry about the vast amount of information that is now available to people on the Web. Searches return thousands ofweb pages, most ofwhich are not useful, yet there is the underlying belief that the information must be "out there somewhere". While it is clear that inadequate document surrogates and search engines are major contributors to this situation, another is that end users often do not know what words to use to describe what they want: if you do not know what to call it, you cannot find itS. This can inhibit successful searching even within a single website. If the target concept is described using one term by the document author, and a different term by the end user, the document will not be retrieved unless support tools (e.g., thesauri) exist that can act as intermediaries, mapping between the terms. The problem is exacerbated when the end user and the document author do not think of the topic in the same way; when there is only partial overlapping between their concepts, or when a concept just does not exist in one oftheir worlds.