Termontography: Ontology Building and the Sociocognitive Approach to Terminology Description

We start from a brief discussion of three shifts which have affected the discipline of terminology over the last decade: the shift towards computational terminology management, the linguistic shift in the theory of terminology and more recently the ontology shift. We briefly introduce the method of termontography, one of the results of the collaboration between terminologists from CVC Brussels and ontology engineers within the framework of the European project FF POIROT (IST 2001-38248). The discipline of terminology is widening its scope towards knowledge representation and knowledge management. On the one hand reflection is needed on how the discipline of terminology can contribute to new challenges like the(multilingual) semantic web. On the other hand we need to ask how terminology management can benefit from new developments in IT and NL processing, and more specifically how terminology management can use ontologies.