TOTh 2019: On term with Ontology

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If there is a place where terminology and ontology go hand in hand, this is Chambéry, France. By early June, the interesting conferences Terminology & Ontology: Theories and applications, TOTh, organized at the Scientific Campus of University Savoie Mont-Blanc, took place in Chambéry.

This year, the topic of this 13th TOTh International Conference was the Contribution of Ontology to Terminology, as ontology is the standpoint from which our terminology researches should be surrounded, the same way that white mountain chains of Mont Blanc tucks the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region.

As every year, the two first days, 4th and 5th of June, participants attended a training session taught by the organizers of the event: professor Christophe Roche, from Université Savoie, France, and professor Rute Coste, from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Both terminologists talked about the importance of ontology offering a theoretical introduction followed by a practical session.

On 6th and 7th of June, the conferences took place, starting with an opening talk given by prominent terminologist Christian Galinski. Galinski delighted us with an overview of ‘The emergence of terminology science and terminological activities’, which was a great introduction to open the way to around thirty talks on terminology. During those two days, attendees had the opportunity to know about terminology projects working with different languages, such as English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Italian, or Slovene. Those activities are led by a great variety of institutions, especially universities. Here you have some examples:

– Juan Rojas-Garcia, Universidad de Granada, Spain, and LexiCon Research Group, presented an interesting work on the extraction of terms related to beaches, which may help to reach a conclusion on maritime phenomena;

Hui Liu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China, thanks to whom we boarded the world of aviation related terms;

– Youcef Ihab Morsi, Université de Franche-Comté, France, who explained us the challenges of terminology work in Arabic due to the morphological nature of this language,

– Klara Dankova, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy, who presented her researches on textile field showing us how new concepts implies new terms,

– Ana Salgado and Rute Costa, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, whose work on football related terms showed us, once again, that terminology is everywhere.

As you can see, there are a variety of domains and applications of terminology, and an ontological approach increases the chances to sink deeper into the nature of things, to specify and discover their characteristics and meaning.

But the most fascinating is to have the opportunity to share all this experiences with colleagues from all over the world. Isn’t it the dream of each and every ‘entermsiastic’?

There is less than a year left for next TOTh now; so simply visit the TOTh web site and check the information. In the meantime, you can take a look on our previous posts, TOTh2018 and TOTh2017.


Written by Ana Bennasar, Translator, Terminologist, and former Terminology Trainee at TermCoord