Modeling Process of Traffic Safety Terminology with the iglos Software - A Methodological and Terminological Approach

New disciplines with a specific terminology are being developed because of the increasing technical progress. On the whole, these multidisciplinary effects as well as the development of international communication problems between non-professionals and experts of a special field or between experts of different sciences. It becomes usual that technical terms are defined differently in different fields and languages. Therefore, we will present the iglos terminology management system of the Institute for Traffic Safety and Automation Engineering of the Braunschweig University of Technology as a software platform which evolves different methodological approaches for solving lexical and terminological problems between terms of different varieties (technical languages) and natural languages. First of all, these include classical semantic vagueness such as synonymy (relation of words with the same or similar meanings), antonymy (relation of words with the opposite meanings), hypernymy-hyponymy (relation between superordinates and subordinates) and ambiguity (relation of words with several meanings). For example, the German term Sicherheit has two meanings and three translations in English, namely safety, security and certainty. Whereas the first two translations define the feeling of being under protection, the third translation describes the assurance. It is the main target of iglos to avoid the multilingual misunderstanding between special languages of different fields by standardising the definitions of technical terms. In our paper, we will treat the semantic differentiation between safety-related terms as Sicherheit in German and safety and security in English with the iglos terminology modeling process on the basis of the iglos sign model as one method for solving linguistic problems.