Work more efficiently with the Semiant glossary browser extension
Glossaries are a tricky thing: on the one hand, everyone in the team is grateful when there is a well-maintained glossary. On the other hand, nobody wants to take on the work of creating it. The coordination process can also lead to disgruntlement and consume huge amounts of time. And even if there is a good glossary: There is a great risk that many stakeholders will not find out about it and it will gather dust in a drawer.
I have been working on this topic for a while now, as new technologies could help the glossary to experience a renaissance. I will describe below what this could look like. I would also like to invite all readers to try out a solution I helped develop. More on this in the article, including a short video showing how it works.
Use of a glossary
For a glossary to be useful, it must be correct and used. If this is the case, a glossary is very useful:
- Fewer misunderstandings save time, avoid mistakes and reduce friction losses
- New employees can familiarize themselves more quickly and take up less of the specialists' time
- It is less error-prone to deal with product lines and variants
- Maintenance over the product life cycle is simplified
Standard glossary or controlled vocabulary?
Why reinvent the wheel? After all, there are ready-made glossaries on many specialist topics, from "antiques" to "dental technology". And indeed, if a suitable glossary is available, we should use it. For example, the SE Manual of INCOSE a glossary (Appendix C: Terms and Definitions).
Standard glossaries are useful for training. However, a standard glossary rarely covers all relevant terms in projects. In addition, terms known to certain stakeholders may have a different meaning. Therefore controlled vocabulary an important category of a glossary that can supplement or replace a standard glossary. Ideally, we have both a standard glossary and a specific glossary. This can be specific to a project, department or organization.
Intelligently merge glossaries with Semiant
Try Semiant free of charge: https://app.semiant.com
Semiant is a virtual quality assistant that takes over simple tasks in product development. To do this, Semiant connects to any web-based application via a Web browser extension (currently only for Chrome and Edge).
The current version of Semiant is minimal, but already supports multiple sources for the glossary and enables merging in the web browser. You can see how this works in this video:
Development partner wanted
As can be seen in the video, this is currently a minimal demonstrator. However, it shows that the technology works in principle. There are many questions and ideas from here. I am looking for a development partner who basically recognizes the potential and wants to help determine the future direction. Concrete ideas and questions are:
- Which data sources should we support? Semiant currently reads existing glossaries RDF/Turtle data sources.
- How helpful is the extraction of glossary terms via Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
- What team and categorization options should there be? The fundamental question is how expressive the data structures should be.
- How important is the Use case to compile context-relevant information from applicable documents and standards?
Interested? Then feel free to contact me.
