Christophe Roche on Ontoterminology

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We’d like to draw your attention to our new interview, published earlier this week. In it, our interviewer Soraia Monteiro talks to Christophe Roche from the University of Savoie. He’s a pioneering scholar in a new field called ontoterminology. This approach tries to enrich the study of terminology with some ideas from the world of computer science, namely the use of more formalised ontologies.

In computer science, formal ontologies are the cornerstone of Artificial Intelligence, which is the background professor Roche is coming from. In this context, leading AI-scientist Tom Gruber defined an ontology as “a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can formally exist for an agent or a community of agents.” Terminologist will notice that in essence this is not too different from a standard glossary on a certain topic. The key difference is that an ontology should be more strict and explicit, so that it (in the words of Christophe Roche) “can serve as a tool not only for operationalising terminology for IT applications, but also for focusing on concepts independently of language.”

Read the full interview here.

by Brecht Savelkoul

CommunicationsTrainee at TermCoord