Concept System Of Terminology Of Information Sciences And Information Technologies--A Preliminary Study

Since the middle of 20th century, the number of technological terms has been increasing exponentially, especially those of life sciences and information sciences. The rapid proliferation of terms has brought about considerable confusion in understanding and communication. In China, most technological terms are introduced from western languages through translation, and inaccurate or even mistaken translations have added even more confusion. Rather than the rapid proliferation itself, however, it is the inadequate handling of these increasing terms that directly results in the problems of understanding and communication.All the above-mentioned is urging us to explore some solutions such as designing softwares to help us search for the new terms in the face of the rapidly proliferating information on the internet. But further analysis allerts us to a more basic work, that is, construction of terminological concept system, a work that is emphasized in all books on terminology as an essential step to any terminographical works. However, in the separate international standards issued by ISO each of which deals only with a small number of related industrial products we don't see any concept system provided or at most a very small one while in China no attempt has ever been made to build up concept systems in preparing national standards.To say building up concept system is an essential step to all terminological work is because, according to terminology, human beings form characteristics and concepts in their mind based on properties of external objects, with terms being only verbal designations of the concepts thus formed. Furthermore, concept is the unit of knowledge so the concept system based on ontological relation and logical relation reflects the knowledge framework in this field. Since standard terms are in one-to-one correspondence with their related concepts, a standard terminological system should be a concept system mapped onto the linguistic level. A rational concept system is not only a useful tool for organizing the existing terms into a structure easy to understand and to retrieve, but also a great aid for analyzing, defining, and selecting the proper designation of, new terms.In this thesis, we have selected the terminology of information sciences and technologies asour subject. For one thing, new terms in this field are increasing most rapidly and so is the urgency of the social demands. For the other, information sciences and technologies represent a new comprehensive field which contains terms of all types, therefore, the experience we gain in this field will be helpful in directing the terminological work in other fields.To build up the concept system, firstly we have to define what information sciences and technologies are, and to distinguish between core terms and peripheral ones. This thesis points out that information sciences and technologies is a new synthesis of several established disciplineswhich have blended into each other as a result of of the unifying perspective of "information". However, rather than merely a simple addition of these disciplines, information sciences organizes together only those parts of such disciplines that are intimately tied with the concept "information". Up to now, information technology refers mainly to eletronic technologies and the basic digital technology grounded on the binary system, and is composed chiefly of computer science and telecom, but it is never equal to the sum of the two.The discussions on knowledge classification provided by philosophy, library science, l&D and lexicography are all helpful in our compiling the concept system. Discipline-indexing produces a great deal of overlapping, so we'd like to adopt the subject-indexing approach on the basis of ontological relationship. Both "Top-down" and "Bottom-up" modes will be adopted in the building up of concept system. And on the theoretical side, information flow model will be our model, and since the terms so far collected are mostly those referring to hardwares of compu...