Ontologies and Terminology in Knowledge Management
Ontology-Based knowledge management is an area with many similarities to terminology management, but also shows remarkable differences.
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- Relationship grids: While termbases can define, categorize and even group concepts via meta data such as subject, division etc., ontologies represent and manage extensive relationships between many different concepts. For instance, they can manage hierarchical relationships within product groups or products, but also semantic relations between concepts, such as subordinates, superordinates or antonyms.
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- Language support: While ontologies are great at representing these relationships, they are normally monolingual and not capable to represent linguistic knowledge such as when to use or not to use which term for a given concept This of course has long been resolved in terminologies.
quickTerm bridges the gap between these two worlds by introducing the notion of concept maps. They enable you to put an "ontological" view on top of a termbase. However, it is not necessary to assign each and every entry of a termbase into a concept map. Rather, you can create as many individual Concept Maps as you like. For instance, you can create a Concept Map for a certain topic or part of the entire termbase. You can also include an entry (or "node" as we would call it in a structure grid) in more than one Concept Maps.
Another possible usage scenario for Concept Maps is for term brain storming. Concept Maps allow you to visualize a complete topic terminologically and add new term requests to it as you go. These term requests do not have to be filed at this point, so it is easy to still change or delete them.
The types of relationships between the terms can be freely configured. You can create hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationship types. Hierarchical relationships mean that there is a parent and a child in a relation, whereas non-hierarchical are simply a "reference". When you insert a hierarchical relationship from a parent to a child node, then implicitly, the relation from the child to the parent is also added. Each relationship type can also be assigned a different color.
As opposed to the entries themselves, the relationships are stored directly in quickTerm.
Further information