terminographer

A terminographer is a professional who creates, manages, and maintains terminologies—controlled vocabularies, glossaries, thesauri, and ontologies—used to organize and standardize terms within a domain. Terminographers work with subject matter experts to ensure that terms reflect current usage and concepts, and to support consistent indexing, information retrieval, and data interoperability.

Core duties include compiling term lists, selecting preferred terms, writing definitions and scope notes, and documenting usage guidelines and relations among terms (such as broader/narrower, related, and synonyms). They manage synonymy, disambiguation, multilingual terminology, and term metadata; oversee approval workflows, versioning, and lifecycle management; and may perform term extraction from documents or corpora and map terms to standards.

Terminography is common in libraries, archives, museums, government, healthcare, life sciences, engineering, information technology, localization, and standards bodies. Terminographers contribute to controlled vocabularies used in cataloging, indexing, medical coding, knowledge graphs, and digital publishing, enabling reliable search and interoperable data exchange.

Tools and standards frequently used include terminology management systems or thesauri editors, ontology editors, and metadata schemas such as SKOS, ISO 25964, ISO 704, and Dublin Core. Proficiency with databases, spreadsheets, and collaborative platforms is typical.

Individuals typically hold backgrounds in linguistics, lexicography, information science, library science, translation, or computer science, and develop expertise through experience in a domain. Essential skills include research, editing, project management, attention to precision, and the ability to work with subject matter experts.