Multilingual taxonomic and terminological structures of a domain

In developing countries, a well consolidated written tradition has not yet evolved. The reason for this is related to the endurance of colonial domination and consequently to the repression of native culture. Also, in industrialized countries, the rapidity of development has not taken account of the fact that it would be opportune to formalize "niche" knowledge. In both cases, there is an ever growing need for a written formalization of routine knowledge or, to use an accepted terminological term, of tacit knowledge. The different aims of this activity, ranging from the industrialization of workflows to the opportunity of building specialized knowledge collections, are useful to help and to guarantee staff training related to specific practices. Attempts at developing a standardized methodology for modelling and formalizing these kinds of procecces are numerous, and in almost all cases they are connected with one domain or with specific project characteristics. The KADS methodology and its simplified version, CommonKADS, the specific characteristic of which resides in elicitation techniques and the compulsory realisation of a set of models used for the representation of all aspects of the domain application, provided, better than other methodologies, a way of testing the methodological possibilities of work related with the field of handicrafts and medium-sized business. In particular, they enable testing of the necessary modifications to both the methodological path and to the software package used to try to arrive at a further version of the standard strongly oriented towards the use of multilingual taxonomic and terminological structures as keys to acces and consultation.