Discussion on the requirements for a workbench supporting termontography

We focus on the unit-of-understanding approach ‘Termontography’ (Kerremans et al. 2003; Temmerman and Kerremans 2003) and on the requirements concerning a workbench supporting this approach. The main concern is to facilitate the creation of (multilingual) domain-specific dictionaries that hold information such as how a term or phrase is related to other terms in the same lexical field or semantic network of related terms. The need for such a workbench derives from the fact that although current terminology management systems incorporate principles for organising the conceptual structure of terminologies, little or no concern is given to the formal representation of the conceptual systems behind the terminologies of the corresponding domains (Vouros and Eumeridou 2002). Moreover, from our experience, it appears that many tools needed to support our terminological work are either not present in existing commercialised terminology management systems or are very difficult to handle due to the particular organisation of the software workbenches.