Smart grid terminology development—crossing the boundaries of terminology standardization

Background Standardization is concerned with ongoing terminology standardization activities. Activities are rather complex in divergent topics and current themes of interest. The article is concerned with terminology standardization activities in Germany and international standardization activities for smart grids and smart-grid-related topics like smart metering systems, smart homes, and electromobility. Even though standardization topics are very clearly organized by standardization road maps, and responsibilities are distributed among working groups, there are still conceptual overlaps between activities of different groups that will result in inconsistencies and ambiguities in their respective glossaries. These glossaries, however, undergo only a limited process of synchronization during their development, especially on the level of single concepts and terms. The application of inconsistent and ambiguous terminology in standards may later on reduce their internal and external consistency, readability, and understandability. To create high-quality standards, conceptual consistency needs to be guaranteed. To do this, terminologies under development should be made more openly available to standardization working groups in the development phase (and not only after completion). Furthermore, additional synchronization tasks on the conceptual level are needed to generate consistent and clear conceptualizations of new technologies. Methods A number of glossaries have been analyzed for overlaps as described by this article. Results The article gives an overview of issues found in the respective glossaries, and the process can lead to proposals which may be put to vote among domain experts. Conclusions Overall, domain experts working on terminologies should be given more assistance as regards terminological and linguistic knowledge and methodology to assure linguistic and terminological next to technical quality of their terminologies. Future work will be dedicated to issue resolution and assistance for issue identification.