Hanna Heinonen: From Terminology Silos to Reusable Knowledge Assets: Managing Terminology with DITA Glossaries

Many organizations manage terminology across multiple disconnected systems. At KONE, terminology was historically maintained in separate platforms including terminology management systems, controlled language tools, and translation environments. Keeping terminology aligned required updates in multiple places, creating unnecessary maintenance effort and increasing the risk of inconsistencies.

To address this challenge, KONE is adopting DITA glossaries as the authoritative source for terminology. Preferred terms, synonyms, deprecated terms, definitions, images, and related metadata are maintained in structured glossary topics, from which terminology can be reused across authoring, localization, and content delivery workflows. This approach reduces duplicate maintenance, improves governance, and establishes a sustainable single source of truth for terminology.

This webinar provides a practical introduction to DITA glossaries and how they can be used in a real-world content ecosystem. I will share KONE’s terminology journey, discuss the move from multiple terminology repositories to DITA glossary topics, and demonstrate how structured glossary content supports terminology management at scale. The session includes practical examples of DITA glossary topics and their structure, including preferred terms, synonyms, deprecated terms, definitions, and images. We will also look at how glossary entries can be integrated into DITA-based content and how a single glossary entry can be reused across multiple publications and downstream systems.

Finally, I will discuss an unexpected benefit of structured terminology. Over time, terminology databases capture valuable domain knowledge: approved terminology, alternative expressions, definitions, and relationships between concepts. When managed as structured content, glossary data becomes much more than a language resource. It becomes a reusable knowledge asset that can support search, content delivery, localization, and emerging knowledge-driven applications.