See http://www.eaft-aet.net/en/declaration/ for a cooperative European approach to terminology across governments, cultures, and domains of interest.

Terminology can be described as: "a means to share awareness, balancing appropriateness anf fullness of that sharing, through communication and a means for accurate and timely translation of jargon and language."

Once you've built a group's terminology for one subject's context, it's easy to expand it to other contexts shared by the group.

A National Terminology for ARRA can easily be extended into a National Terminology for all activities.  It would enable appropriately secured and shared contextual awareness for the Nation. 

A National Terminology is a mechanim that can enable a major leap forward in National capability and success, and can benefit the entire world.

Here's a proposal, for government, commercial, and non-profit organizations participating in ARRA (structured simlar to an SBIR/STTR approach).

A. Issue my non-profit organization, One World Information System (OWIS), http://www.one-world-is.org, a non-competitive grant (est. 3 FTE, working with a third party consulting firm) to:

1. Work four months doing research, analysis, and planning to implement a Terminology, as I've described it in this idea, for an organization participating in ARRA.
2. Work two months to write, staff, and submit a Terminology Analysis Report identifying the type of effort required to implement the organization's terminology.

B. Then, when the Terminology Analysis Report recommendations are accepted, issue my organization another non-competitive grant (est. 5 FTE, with third party consulting firm) to:

1. Work four months to develop, document, and deploy (on a test network) a prototype of the organization's terminology operating on a terminology server.
2. Work two months to operate and refine the prototype terminology content and server and its documentation.

C.  When the Prototype is accepted as successful, then issue my organization another non-competitive grant (est. 8 FTE with third part consulting firm) for one year to develop, document, and deploy the organization's Terminology on a production-grade Terminoilogy Server on the organization's production intranet, and Internet if appropriate.

Repeat steps A, B, and C for multiple government, commercial, and non-profit organizations for simultaneous or phased (about two months apart) Terminology development and deployment grant-projects, to then operationally provide terminology-based integration, unification,  cooperation, appropriately-shared situational awareness and user-customization,and unified-federation across terminology-enabled organizations.

When these terminologies are in place, the intended ARRA results, and the transparency of resource use for those results, will be much more quickly, easily, securely, and economically attained.

See further elaboration in the idea at http://www.thenationaldialogue.org/ideas/terms-terminology-existing-government-controls-management-life-cycle.

Here are some examples of other national activities that could share a National Terminology built for ARRA, that provides a fundamental Nation-wide analysis, model, and knowledge base for nationwide strategic management life cycle activities and management controls, all with appropriate controls for privacy, confidentiality, and security built in from the beginning.

1. Use or extend the National Terminology for ARRA to support the new H.R. 1703 Bill "to require a study and comprehensive analytical report on transforming America by reforming the Federal tax code through elimination of all Federal taxes on individuals and corporations and replacing the Federal tax code with a transaction fee-based system. "  A National Terminology for ARRA would provide a value-chain model (i.e., axiology) and knowledge model (i.e., ontology) that could be easily used and extended to support this complex economic analysis and reporting requirement, to include ontology-based process and axiology-based value-chain simulation of the Bill's impacts, appropriate transaction fee rates, etc. 

2. Use or extend the National Terminology for ARRA for managing and informing the many diverse "alternative energy" endeavors across the nation.

3.  Use the National Terminology for ARRA as the value-chain model to identify carbon costs, nitrogen costs, carcinogens, toxins, and other pollutants in a given value-stream and value-chain, so that producers, consumers, and then government can take appropriate ecological measures.

4. Etc.

I work in State Government.  Because of the numerous, varied and competing agenda's, there is significant overlap, gap and misfires in communication and as a result in resource utilization.  This is bound to be evident in Federal Government as well.  The idea of a standard language, comparable to the ANSI standards for industry, would allow for substantive and sustainable efficiencies in governing. 

Technically, this national and even global terminology would now be relatively easy, low-cost, and fast.  Much of it can be automated by assembling existing technologies. 

To elaborate on some content from one of the leading terminology tool sites:

What is terminology?  Terminology is the foundation of all communication.  At its most basic level it is the study and ultimately usage of words or phrases that have a particular meaning, these words or phrases are referred to as terms.

Terminology grows in importance as terms become increasingly adopted by diverse organizations to describe a company, product, service or even a unique selling point.   

Why is it important to manage terminology?  If left unmanaged, terminology can become inconsistent, leading to failed communication where the sending-person’s meaning is not correctly perceived by the receiving-person.  This failed communication is common, while the sender and receiver may falsely believe that have successfully communicated and thus have the same understanding.  This is the proverbial "Tower of Babel".

The hard part in building, using, and maintaining a terminology has always been cultural and individual awareness of what is possible and why it is needed.

Ok, this post and the follow ups are a joke, but the imitial point is valid and it's already been done: it's called ITIL.  The British have gone through many of these issues and soleved them already.  ITIL, CoBIT, whatever, just don't solve the same issue again when it's already been solved.

ITIL is a good start at a domain terminology - specifically the management of IT services.  Perhaps EricNay skeptically perceives that all aspects of the ARRA fit somewhere under IT Service Management (ITSM).

An ITIL/ITSM-like approach, and any other domain/subject maturation and standardization approach, can be used to build a domian-specific shared and controlled vocabulary, and the process models, data models, business rules, knowledge-models, and value-chains present in that domain. 

The question is: how complete is the terminology for the domain, and how consistent are the terminology methods across domains - said consistency needed for interoperability across domains. 

Is ITIL V3 (with Asset Management, Configuration Item (i.e., asset context), Service Management, etc.) inclusive of or immediately interoperable with:

• COBIT4 (project justification and prioritization),
• CMMI (mature developmen), Six-Sigma (best practice),
• PMI or PRINCE2 (Project Modeling)
• IDEF1x, ERD, ORM, UML (Class/Data modeling)  
• BPMN (process modeling),
• Ontology-modeling (knowledg-modeling),
• Axiology-modeling (value-chain modeling),
• Balanced Scoredard (BSC, Direction or Command modeling),
• Enterprise Architecture (in its many fragmented and incomplete varieties)?

The answer to the above question is no.  ITIL is one of many diverse terminologies that need to be mapped to a unifying terminology (i.e., generalized) to be made interoperable. 

So all of these above diverse "standard" approaches to their specific function/domain/subject are great, but none are providing a foudation by which ALL the domains can translate each other's meaning and values, and thus be interoperable within a concurrent management life cycle.