[SystemSafety] Technical Terminology

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

It seems the issue of technical terminology interests a lot of List participants, and we have heard
various views expressed on apparently controversial concepts such as software reliability.

For those motivated to try to do something concrete about improving technical terminology in the
area of electrotechnical safety and security, here is some info about what is going on and how you
can contribute.

The SmartTerms project ran at the PTB in Braunschweig (the government lab which inter alia determine
measurements and calibration standards for physical quantities), the Technical University of
Braunschweig Institute for Traffic Safety and Automation Technology (IVA), and my RVS group in
Bielefeld. (The English name for Braunschweig is Brunswick, which is close to the old German name
Brunswiek.) The object of SmartTerms was to capture and compare new terminology being generated in
the new areas of electrotechnology, and propose unified terminology that, well, does everything
everyone wants from technical terms.

In my view, the task is massive and there is no way it could be solved in 6 person-years of work.
Two-thirds of the effort came from professional linguists, Suzanne Arndt at TU-BS IVA and Tatyana
Sheveleva at PTB. The project ended at the end of September 2015 and the final report is due "any
day now".

TU-BS IVA runs a terminology database and visualisation tool named iglos which captures and displays
connections between concepts. Part of the SmartTerms project was to enhance the iglos term base and
make use of its tools to rationalise (more precisely: to suggest to standards committees a
rationalisation of) new terminology. People here might be interested in iglos
http://www.iglos.de/doc/?language=en . Many person-years of work have gone into iglos and, we hope,
will continue to do so.

One of the first results of SmartTerms was shown to the 61508 Maintenance Team IEC SC65A MT 61508-3
in November 2014. Chris Goeker at Bielefeld compiled a def-use graph of terms in IEC 61508-3,
referenced to the terminology definitions in 61508-4. Terms are arranged right and left, written in
10pt font with double- or triple-spacing. The graph is some 3m long. You take one look at it and
wonder how on earth any of this terminology can work at all well.

There will likely be a follow-on project to SmartTerms, called Harbsafe, which concentrates on
safety and security terminology in electrotechnology. The project is seen as strategically important
by the German electrotechnology standardisation authority DKE. It was technically approved in June
2015, but the formal (administrative) criteria couldn't be fulfilled. We are still trying to bring
it to fruition.

Let me suggest what safety engineers who are motivated enough to pursue concretely the improvement
of technical terminology can do.

First, you can download the IEC comments form from the IEC WWW site. It is a table in A4 landscape
format. There are columns for source (who you are), location and content (a specific place in a
specific document which you wish to modify), reasoning (you have to say what is unsatisfactory) and
suggested resolution (you are expected to formulate a satisfactory alternative to what you
criticise). All that is quite reasonable, but the form is unwieldy for people who don't use
Microsoft Word :-(

Then you can send that filled-out comments form to your <country> National Committee which mirrors
SC65A MT 61508-3. You can find out how to do that by contacting your country's electrotechnology
standardisation agency. It's usually pretty simple - a specific person with an e-mail address to
whom to send it. Every comment - *every comment* - must be processed by the National Committee.
There is a column for "action taken", and that will be filled out by the NC delegates, and the
result returned to you. There is, of course, no guarantee of satisfactory action.

The National Committee gathers the comments on which it believes action should be taken, and passes
those comments on to IEC SC65A MT 61508-3, whose Terminology subgroup will consider them and propose
action. That proposed action will be passed back to the originating <country> National Committee and
thence theoretically to the proposer. That proposed action will be incorporated into a draft new
version of IEC 61508, which ultimately will be sent out for review and comment by the National
Committees of all participating countries, and voted on. That cycle is a few years long.

How well this works is a matter for a separate debate. The point is that there is a process for it.
And the process is almost certainly more effective than airing one's views on a mailing list such as
this and hoping that standards committees will somehow absorb them through the ether.

One guess as to who is currently chairing the Terminology subcommittee of IEC SC65A MT 61508-3 :-)

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de





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