Dealing with terminological variation in Termontography: examples from the ‘PoCeHRMOM’ project

This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, we intend to present the PoCeHRMOM project, funded by the Flemish government in the framework of IWT-TETRA. The main purpose of this project is to develop a trilingual (English, French, Dutch) terminological knowledge repository of competency-based occupation profiles. Starting from this repository, companies will be able to set up lists of competencies (i.e. sets of skills, knowledge and behaviour) that they associate with given tasks or jobs in their organisations. An efficient maintenance of such lists leads to better support in job planning, objective criteria and norms for the evaluation of personnel, a higher interest in the learning opportunities within the company, an improvement of the procedures for selections, a better acknowledgment of the acquired competencies, a better insight in the structure of the organisation, etc. Moreover, automatic information exchange between different players in the job market (e.g. job sites, recruitment offices, employers and job candidates) is facilitated as terms used as job titles or terms used to denote competencies are linked to a formal resource of concepts and relations. Examples will be given of how such automatic information exchange would work.
The study of terms denoting jobs or competencies brings us to the second part of this article. In many cases, several terms can denote exactly the same or almost the same category (e.g. system developer vs. software developer vs. application developer). In the second part of this article, we intend to discuss how terminological variation is dealt with in Termontography, a terminological approach in which theory and practices of sociocognitive terminology description (Temmerman 2000) are combined with methods in application-oriented, text-based ontology development (Zhao 2004). In particular, we will demonstrate with examples from the PoCeHRMOM project, how the MCFE application can account for several types of terminological variation (cf. Bowker and Hawkinson 2006; Daille et al. 1996; Dubuc 1997). The MCFE is a tool developed by CVC Brussels to set up multilingual categorisation frameworks (Kerremans 2004).