As noted previously, the ever-evolving world of compliance has created the need for a living terminological resource for technical terms. For that reason the Compliance Dictionary is constantly updated with new terms and definitions to serve this need. It is however important to discern between scenarios that warrant a new term and those that do not. Adding terms willy nilly would require more hours than there are in a day, and would leave little time for even reading Authority Documents, let alone mapping them into the system!
With that in mind, the The main reason for adding a new term is that it is significant to a particular Authority Document. That is, if a term appears in an Authority Document Glossary or if a term needs to be tagged as part of a mandate in the Citation Mapping Process we will need to add that term to our dictionary. Conversely, if we do not need to tag a term as part of a mandate and/or if it does not appear in the Glossary then we shouldn’t add the term to the dictionary.
Another reason to add a term is if it is going to be tagged as part of a common control. Since match accuracy ratings (or match percentages) depend on the linkages between the tagged terms in mandates and the tagged terms in controls we need to ensure that - before we create a new control - all of the terms in the control title have corresponding terms and definitions in the dictionary. Since some controls were created prior to the integration of tagging into the Mapper system you will occasionally run into a control that has not been tagged in the matching phase. In some cases the words and phrases within the control do not have corresponding dictionary entries, and thus those will also have to be created. It should be noted that finding an untagged control is becoming increasingly rare, however it does still happen on occasion.
Since term creation is one of the most time consuming aspect of Mapping, it’s in your best interest to get it right the first time. With that in mind, please refer to the Ten Commandments of Term Entry.