A Conceptual Glossary for Systems Engineering: Define the Concept, don't quibble about the terms.

We seem to spend a lot of our time defining terms, arguing over terms, standardizing terms, and misunderstanding terms. In connection with my development of a planning language, and its basic textbook I had to make a decision regarding my glossary. One of the formal design requirements I had set for myself was that the planning language, and its textbooks were easy to translate into other international languages. It was primarily in order to satisfy that requirement that I came up with the concept of a concept-centered glossary, rather than the conventional term-focused glossary (like a conventional dictionary). The basic idea is that we focus on defining a concept, no matter how many synonyms it might have, or how many different opinions there are about what the concept should be called.