New approach to interactive terminologies discussion

Summary

This report describes the result of the third year research of the Terminology Project within the Multiple Scale and Extreme Events motive of the Food Systems program of Wageningen University & Research. The aim of this project is to create support for researchers from different teams and disciplines to quickly create a shared understanding of the terms to be used in their collaborative project or task. Given the diversity of experts and stakeholders in research areas such as Food Systems, confusion and misunderstanding of the terminology used can easily arise. The interpretation of terms often remains implicit, which may cause problems at a later stage. Our assumption is that an interactive visualization of the terminology will be helpful. Rather than trying to set up full definitions for the terms used, simple ‘triples’ can express the meaning of these terms. Triples are elementary phrases in the form of subject-predicate-object (e.g. ‘delta – has issue – flooding’). Visualization of such association with a simple tool can support research teams in quickly creating some level of common understanding and demarcation of terms within a project or task. We also assume that associated terms could help to define a term and that it will be much faster and fun if these associated terms are generated automatically by the tool. For this we can build on results in the field of semantic association computation. With TALK, Team Associations for Linking Knowledge, we successfully created a game and supporting tool that already to some extent meets these requirements. The teams were able to clarify a set of core terms without the need for full definitions. The visualization and interactive use of the tool effectively assisted the discussion and the participants enjoyed using the tool. Automatic creation of associations does reduce the workload for generic terms, but not so much for specific terms. The evaluation sessions with TALK lead to a number of proposals for further improvement of the game and tool, and on how the outcomes can be used further. For example, it could be based on a more specific repository for generating more relevant associations, such the Wageningen Library. Also, storage of the graphs and using the results for creating or extending controlled vocabularies could be a useful next step.