BTMEX; el Banco de Terminología de México

Abstract

As a response to the increasing need to establish technical and scientific communication effectively at national and international levels; the project “BTMEX; the term bank of Mexico” was set up at El Colegio de México. BTMEX’s main objetive is to register each concept of a specific subject field and the different terms used to denote it; indicating the recommended term; acceptable synonyms and terms that should be avoided. It also includes grammatical information on each term as well as a definition of the concept and a context to show each term in its own linguistic environment. Bibliographic references used during research are recorded as well. Since BTMEX was designed as a working tool; a flexible computational system was implemented in which a wide range of search strategies are available as to allow the end-user to find it if not all the information he is looking for; at least a useful part of it. These strategies include searching for full terms; left; right or left and right truncated terms; any string of contiguous characters; individual words on an arbitrary subset of the full term. It is also possible to consult an alphabetic index of terms contained in the bank from which one or several terms may be selected to retrieve the required information. BTMEX includes information in Spanish; English and French; and during the first stage it will only contain information on the environment.