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SMB/4438/R

STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLAN (SBP)

IEC/TC or SC
1
Secretariat
AENOR
Date
2010-10

Please ensure this form is annexed to the Report to the Standardization Management Board if it has been prepared during a meeting, or
sent to the Central Office promptly after its contents have been agreed by the committee.

Title of TC
Terminology

A Background

Inside the International Electrotechnical Commission the work on terminology began in
1909, leading, in 1911, to the setting up of TC1,which is its oldest established committee.

TC1 is a semantic committee whose scope is to sanction the terms and definitions used in
the different electrotechnical fields and to determine the equivalence of the terms used in
the different languages. As a consequence, its task is to prepare the International
Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV) aiming at the standardization and co-ordination of the
terms relating to electrical sciences and techniques for use in the technical language and
literature, in technical specifications and in commercial exchanges, and at giving their
equivalents in the different languages.

The IEV is subdivided into different Parts. Up to now, more than 80 Parts have been
published, classified in the following subjects:

1- General concepts
2- Materials
3- Measurement, regulation and calculation
4- Electric equipment
5- Electronic equipment
6- Generation, transmission and distribution of electric energy
7- Telecommunications
8- Particular applications

TC 1 has the overall responsibility for preparing the IEV and forwarding the corresponding
data, in their French and English versions, to IEC Central Office for its publication. All other
IEC Technical Committees must ensure that their own terms and definitions will not be in
contradiction with those from the IEV.

As a rule, the preparation of an IEV Part is entrusted by TC 1 to a particular technical
committee i.e. either one of the other "semantic" committees or a product committee. In
that case, the drafts are prepared by a Joint Working Group of this Technical Committee in
co-operation with TC1 Secretariat, and (with the exception of the Committee Draft) are
circulated under the control of TC1 and with a TC1 number.

When the revision of one IEV Part is related to the work of several technical committees, its
preparation is taken over by TC1. In these cases, TC1 does invite those other technical
committees to join the Joint Working Group which is entrusted with the preparatory work.

Whilst it is admitted that the terminology related to electrical safety is in the domain of
TC/SCs holding a safety pilot function, it is the responsibility of TC1 to take care of the
consistency of the IEV in the case of conflicting concepts coming from those TC/SCs.


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The working procedures of TC1, in relation to its links with the other TCs and with IEC
Central Office, are detailed in the document "ISO/IEC Directives, Supplement Procedures
specific to IEC, Annex I". Two different procedures are used. New projects will follow the
standard procedure with the CD, CDV and FDIS steps. Revision of existing parts, sectors of
existing parts and their maintenance will follow the database procedure submitted to the
evaluation and the verification steps by the IEV Coordinating Committee (IEVCC) and
mainly developed on the web.

B Business Environment
B.1 General

The establishment of a comprehensive and consistent terminology is a prerequisite for the
development of the standards by the technical committees, and for their understanding and
implementation by the final users (e.g. standards writers, product designers, test laboratory
engineers, technical translators, legal and regulatory authorities, teachers and students of
schools, colleges and universities). The terminology work carried out by TC 1 is aimed at
providing all other technical committees with such an overall terminology, meant to be
directly applicable, and to which they can refer, when necessary, for their own specific
terminology requirements.

Hence through a close co-operation between TC 1 and the other IEC Technical
Committees. terminology work in the framework of the IEV has been carried out. In addition
a number of IEC Technical Committees prepare glossaries of terms and definitions for the
purpose of their own publications, which they wish to include in the "terms and definitions"
clause of their own standards or technical reports. These TCs must ensure that their
documents remain in coherence with IEV terminology. These concepts should not diverge
from the original terms and definitions of the IEV.

Terms and definitions of this kind may also contain concepts of general interest, which do
not already appear in any Part of the IEV. The integration of these concepts in the IEV is of
course desirable. However, their definitions will not, as a rule, adhere to strict terminology
rules, and their consistency with the overall IEV cannot thus be guaranteed. In that case a
preliminary study of these concepts by TC 1 members is necessary.

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B.2 Market demand

The market demands are those of the general public such as universities or users, or
translators of technical documents of engineering companies or manufacturers, that may
need precise reference in the matter of electrotechnical terminology.

Moreover, there is a real demand from other TCs for finding the best way to define their
terms.

Because of that, the IEC Central Office and the IEC/TC1 will keep on jointly examining the
best ways of promoting the IEV and improving the dissemination of its appropriate material
(CD-ROM, on-line database of Electropedia, etc.).

B.3 Trends in technology

TC1 is conscious of the growing demand of the general public to gain access to the
available reference on Internet. All the IEV terms are now available free of charge on the
IEC website in a database form under the name of "Electropedia" or via the website
"http://www.electropedia.org". Electropedia was announced in e-tech April 2007 and has
been expanded to include several additional languages. It now allows searches for terms
and definitions in English and French and for equivalent terms in Arabic, Chinese, Italian,
German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The database is divided into
78 main subject areas and contains the complete set of the original International
Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV) series of standards, which numbers over 20 000 entries.

B.4 Market trends
Nowadays, there is a rapid development of the electrical technology and, accordingly, an
increasing worldwide demand of terminology for establishing a common business dialogue
in order to manage and exchange technical product or system information.
In accordance with this, terminology standards should be used to homogenize this
vocabulary and to improve communications.

B.5 Ecological environment

Until now, the terminology standards did not consider environmental impact terms. Recently
IEC/TC111 "Environmental standardization for electrical and electronic products and
systems" circulated the first draft glossary of terms on environmental aspects. TC1 will
support this development with the objective of preparing an IEV part for environment-
related concepts.

C System approach aspects

The system approach is not associated to the building of the terminology.

D Objectives and strategies (3 to 5 years)

In the near future, the effort of TC 1 will be mainly centered on the revision and/or
maintenance of Parts whose maintenance review date is 2009 or prior to 2009.Product TCs
have already been consulted during 2010 and several Parts have also been confirmed.

Improvement of the co-operation with the other technical committees, will be another aim.
Those technical committees that do not carry out terminology work in co-operation with TC1
within the framework of IEV shall be invited to participate in this work.In this line, all TCs
have been invited to use IEV as the reference terminology.However the best attitude is to
promote co-operation between TC 1 and the technical committees at the earliest stage of
development of the terms and definitions within these TCs. A new action is foreseen in
order to increase the effective utilization of IEV by the complete translation of each
definition in all the languages now used for lemma translation.
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This action will be progressively developed directly by each involved National Committee.

Another important issue is the joint work between TC 1 and IEC Central Office to manage
and to upgrade the database using the electronic tools provided by IEC CO.

E Action plan

The action plan is:

- The revision and/or maintenance of the different IEV Parts. In 2011 1Q after Seattle
GM Parts with stability dates 2009, 2010, and 2011 will have a new stability date.
- Elaboration of new IEV Parts on demand
- Joint work between TC1 and IEC Central Office to apply the database procedure

F Useful links to IEC web site

IEC/TC 1 dashboard giving access to Membership, TC/SC Officers, Scope, Liaisons, WG/MT/PT
structure, Publications issued along with their Stability Dates, Work Programme and similar
information for SCs, if any.

Name or signature of the secretary

Mr. Miguel Angel ARANDA GMEZ