The Ten Commandments of Term Entry

Owned by Steven Murawski
Last updated: Nov 10, 2023
2 min read

Back in the days of yore (when terms were entered on stone tablets) the Great Elders decreed that the ancient Mappers followed ten (10) good practice rules:

  • All terms must be entered in American English (i.e. color vs colour)

  • All terms must be entered in singular form (i.e. technology vs technologies)

  • The standard term must be entered in its fullest form (i.e. virtual local area network identifier vs VLAN ID)

  • When defining terms, be mindful of the term’s context in the document (i.e. some terms have multiple definitions. If the document describes a system service, the definition must refer to an application and not a means of delivering value)

  • Take care to designate the term properly (i.e. a software application should be an asset and not a noun)

  • Definitions for sourced terms must be taken from publicly available sources (i.e. avoid definitions from behind paywalls, membership pages, or clients' internal documents)

  • Definitions for sourced terms must come from authoritative sources (i.e. internet forums, Wikipedia, and general sales and marketing materials are of questionable provenance and should not be used)

  • Make sure that you enter all of the appropriate ‘Other Forms’ (Note: if a term has multiple designations you must add other forms for all of them or the definition with other forms missing will not appear as a selectable option in the tagging task)

  • The term hierarchy must contain at least twenty (20) semantic relationships. Otherwise your match percentage will likely be too low. More information on the importance of semantic relationships to the Matching process can be found here.

  • When defining terms via Per ISO, be sure to follow organizationally defined practices for term standardization. More on Per ISO can be found here