of the book: “Survey of the state of the art in human language technology”)

12.5.1 What is Terminology? Whenever and wherever specialized information and knowledge are created, communicated, recorded, processed, stored, transformed or re-used, terminology is involved in one way or another. Subject-field communication has become a specific type of discourse with specialized texts differentiating between a whole array of text types. When we define terminology as a structured set of concepts and their designations in a particular subject field, it can be considered the infrastructure of specialized knowledge. Technical writing and technical documentation are thus impossible without properly using terminological resources. Since the production of technical texts increas-ingly involves several languages, high-quality multilingual terminologies have become scarce and much desired commodities on the burgeoning markets of language and knowledge industries. 12.5.2 Interdisciplinary Research The research field we talk about is referred to as terminology science, its practical field of application is in ter-minology management, which includes the creation of subject-field specific terminologies and the terminographic 1This section has been compiled on the basis of current discussions in terminology science and experience in a multitude of terminological activities world-wide.