ISO/TC 37 is a technical committee within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that prepares standards and other documents concerning methodology and principles for terminology and language resources.
Title: Terminology and other language and content resources
Scope: Standardization of principles, methods and applications relating to terminology and other language and content resources in the contexts of multilingual communication and cultural diversity
ISO/TC 37 is a so-called "horizontal committee", providing guidelines for all other technical committees that develop standards on how to manage their terminological problems. However, the standards developed by ISO/TC 37 are not restricted to ISO. Collaboration with industry is sought to ensure that the requirements and needs from all possible users of standards concerning terminology, language and structured content are duly and timely addressed.
Involvement in standards development is open to all stakeholders and requests can be made to the TC through any liaison or member organization (see the list of current members and liaisons of ISO/TC 37:)
ISO/TC 37 standards are therefore fundamental and should form the basis for many localization, translation, and other industry applications.
ISO/TC 37 "Terminology and other language and content resources" International Standards are developed by experts from industry, academia and business who are delegates of their national standards institution or another organization in liaison. Involvement, therefore, is principally open to all stakeholders. They are based on consensus among those national standards institutes who collaborate in the respective committee by way of membership.
ISO/TC 37 develops International Standards concerning: terminological principles and methods vocabulary of terminology and language resource management terminology work preparation and management of language resources preparation and layout of terminology standards computerized terminography and lexicography terminology documentation coding and codes in the field of terminology and other language resources applications of terminology and other language resources in language engineering and content management translation, interpreting and related technology
ISO/TC 37 looks upon a long history of terminology unification activities. In the past, terminology experts - even more so experts of terminology theory and methodology - had to struggle for wide recognition. Today their expertise is sought in many application areas, especially in various fields of standardization. The emerging multilingual information society and knowledge society will depend on reliable digital content. Terminology is indispensable here. This is because terminology plays a crucial role wherever and whenever specialized information and knowledge is being prepared (e.g. in research and development), used (e.g. in specialized texts), recorded and processed (e.g. in data banks), passed on (via training and teaching), implemented (e.g. in technology and knowledge transfer), or translated and interpreted. In the age of globalization the need for methodology standards concerning multilingual digital content is increasing - ISO/TC 37 has developed over the years the expertise for methodology standards for science and technology related content in textual form.
Terminology standardization
The beginnings of terminology standardization are closely linked to the standardization efforts of IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission, founded in 1906) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization, founded in 1946).
A terminology standard according to ISO/IEC Guide 2 (1996) is defined as "standard that is concerned with terms, usually accompanied by their definitions, and sometimes by explanatory notes, illustrations, examples, etc."
ISO 1087-1:2000 defines terminology as "set of designations belonging to one special language" and designations as "representation of a concept by a sign which denotes it". Here, concept representation goes beyond terms (being only linguistic signs), which is also supported by the state-of-the-art of terminology science, according to which terminology has three major functions:
basic elements carrying meaning in domain communication, ordering of scientific-technical knowledge at the level of concepts, access to other representations of specialized information and knowledge.
The above indicates that terminological data (comprising various kinds of knowledge representation) possibly have a much more fundamental role in domain-related information and knowledge than commonly understood.