Author: Rieks Joosten ([email protected])
Everyone has its own terminology (i.e.: terminology is subjective). This is easily verified by counting the number of discussions about terms that we continuously witness (or participate in).
This is a widely recognized, and ancient problem when working together. This is exemplified by the story of the Tower of Babel and many similar stories that are being told in various cultures.
A recent example, is in the area of "Identity Hubs and Agents", as demonstrated by a thread with that title in the W3C Credentials Community Group. Terminology for Agent~Hub-Related Identity Concepts contributed by Daniel Hardman postulates the need for "a space to explore an aligned mental model and terminology that will let us begin to tell a coherent and consistent story about hubs and agents. We need this alignment and terminology for a global reference architecture for decentralized identity, and to help resolve confusion about the hub~agent distinction in identity circles", and a first draft of what this is all about.
And there are many more.
The generic question that needs to be answered is this: How to create a terminology that is actually useful, i.e. that within a given context, people demonstrably have the same understanding of (a coherent set of) term(s), and that these terms are relevant therein.
Answering this question seems to require us setting the following goals:
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create a (topic) paper that specifies a (generic) terminology process (at the same time developing the terminology for that process).
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select one or two topics (one of which could be around the "Identity Hubs and Agents") and use them to
- create a (first/draft) terminology for that topic, and
- validate what we write in the generic terminology process paper