The DANTERM Model Revisited

In this paper we present the history of a model for a terminology management system, be it for big national term banks or for corporate term-bases. We go through the development stages of the DANTERM Model, starting in the late 1970's where the main purpose was translation, and advanced IT systems were not available, and ending today where more advanced terminology management systems (TMS) exist. Furthermore, systems for automatic extraction of information about concepts, automatic construction and consistency checking of concept systems (terminological ontologies) are now being developed. Both advanced TMS systems and automatic systems require new terminological data categories. Despite the existence of advanced TMS's, a very important problem has not been solved, namely the proper handling of equivalence relationships in multicultural terminology. We propose a solution to this problem and encourage ISO TC 37 committees, developing standards which prescribe data structures for terminological data, to incorporate the proposed solution.