Building a living glossary

A 'living' glossary where the community is actively involved in selection, collaborative writing, annealing and evangelism is a powerful way to create alignment, share meaning, improve communication, focus attention and help with making key distinctions.

Developing and using a common language (lingua franca) is perhaps the most powerful (and basic?) knowledge practice of all. Before we can share, understand, become aware, design or co-create new thoughts, we have to find a way to effectively communicate, separate concepts, recognise differences, discover and appreciate new terms.

If we are to design a knowledge space - we will need a glossary to assist us make sense of our individual worlds and leverage our shared meaning. Adopting terminology and definitions from elsewhere seldom works - what we need is discourse to surface meaning, conversations to discover individual beliefs and assumptions and dialog to arrive at a common meaning for the most used terms.

Here are some questions to help us think about building a glossary:

Design considerations

* Level and abstraction - should it be by keyword, concept, topic?

* Hyperlinking - should all word occurrences in the master text be linked?, should the glossary be available from a frame?, should only the first occurrence be linked? does there have to be a linked alphabetic term list? should related terms be linked?

* Authority - who has the rights & responsibilities to add, suggest, change. Can they also do the linking back to the text?

* Templates - should the end point offer more than a definition, e.g. examples, links to: key people, ways to learn & network, related terms & concepts. What glossary format is best for encouraging learning?

* Profiling - what weight should interaction with the glossary carry in determination / construction of personal profiles? i.e. what does looking something up in a glossary really tell us about individual behavior around text?

* User interface - what are the best practices here? e.g. should glossary terms already visited be distinguished? should you be offerred a mini-tour to make concepts clearer?

* Subscription - for update notification

* Bootstrapping - select an existing corpus that best fits with group goals and matches the domain, avoid starting from scratch, toss away all terms that do not resonate and build from the remaining core.

More than form, functionality and structure, the key to a living glossary is engagement with all participants

This Wiki page has links to examples and articles (minor repetition)

Comments

[David Locke]

I've written glossaries professionally. I have not moved to thesarus construction, or controlled vocabularies. Glossaries fit into the controlled vocabulary continuum as well as taxonomies and classification.

Definitions serve as the locus for domain-based culture. Being on or in a domain are different orientations based on focus. Am I surface, or am I a critical expert, or am I a driving expert. The definitions of these individuals are not the same. What does it take to make the cultural shift?

Definitions are also conceptualizations. They provide a place for a concept to exist and be communicated. Finding the definition is a communications task that happens after the concept is discovered, after Aha! The definition is the means to market the concept. And, in a market a concept has many different definitions.

Definitions are taxonomies. They are the taxons that allow use to say what differentiates this concept from others. Definitions are likewise ontological, because the taxons can only arise, if they are sortables within the ontology. Can I see it, can I count it? If not I can hardly define it. Ontologies determine who is in and who is on in regards to a specific discipline.

So a defintion arises in taxonomic, ontological, and social networks. Likewise, they participate in processes that tie these networks together: concept creation, conceptualization, bibliographic maturity, adoption by the research community, adoption by markets.

Defintions exist in temporal windows, because the taxonomies and taxons, the selection criteria are always under assalt by competitors. Each seller has a definition that is slightly different from the other sellers. Lexical warfare in the market and corpi erode defintions to the point of meaninglessness.

Concepts arise either divergently or convergently. In the divergent case, you are starting with on corpus. In the convergent case, you are starting with multipile corpi. There is no one answer for bootstrapping. My on take on bootstraping is that everyone involved brings their own personal definitions and taxonomies to the table.

With taxonomies, this means post-coordination. It means accepting the fact that there is not one taxonomy or one definition at the beginning. The effort is to coverge and bridge the taxonomies in a way that doesn't reduce diversity.

This also means that there is no power authority. The library science definition of authority means preferred term and not who has the ability to add, suggest, change, or link. I've worked in many places where I didn't have a power relationship, so I couldn't participate in and defining. I think that power authority is destructive to social construction.

The market effects on terminology, definition, glossary, taxonomy, and ontology work against any notion of a central, power-authorized meaning. Your bosses competitors can always undermine his conceptualization.

All these definitions and taxonomies create a multitude of links. Information architecture organizes content (nodes) and links. The preference today is away from inline links. This plays with the template notion. I use information architecture frameworks in my work. I resist inline links, instead I use a consistent layout that says if you need more information on a facet look here. And, that is where I list the links. Each facet gets its own list of links. Consistency sets expectations. Consistency meets expectations.

Keep in mind also that in hypertext theory nodes and links have equal weight in defining knowledge. A link is not a page turning device. A link is an association between the source and the target content. A link can be computationally complex as well. A single link might open all the competing definitions rather than just one.

Level of abstraction is a continuum. You should be able to move from corpus entry to summary to conceptualization to concept to keyword (instance) to keyword (class or classes). The corpus entry is the definiton. It is the text that should appear in the glossary. A glossary should not use any terms not in the corpus entry.

This means that, while glossary construction is valuable, it is the corpus entry is the act of definition. Glossary is a post-creation, metadata process. Collaboration should stay focused on creating the written definition within the corpus document(s), then glossary construction will be straightforward and will not involve power authority.