TBX Development Website

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“This is the place [to develop TBX and TBX resources].”

Webmaster: Caleb Thompson

ISO 30042 Ballot

The FDIS ballot succeeded.  ISO Central Secretariat has published ISO 30042:2019.

ISO 30042:2019 Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content—

TermBase eXchange (TBX)

TBX, or TermBase eXchange, is the international standard for representing and exchanging information about terminology. The previous version of the TBX standard was published in 2008 and is sometimes referred to as TBX 2.0.

The new version has been under development for a number of years. It is known as TBX 3.0. The ISO 30042:2019 draft has been updated to respond to the comments associated with a ballot held in April 2018, and ISO Central Secretariat has published the new version.

A number of changes have been introduced in preparing the revised version of the standard.

Part of the new TBX standard lists or refers to a Master Data Category List, which lists all the data categories that can be included in a TBX file. This list used to be called the TBX Default list. This name has been discontinued under the new standard.

There may still be mentions of ‘TBX Default’ on this website or elsewhere. They should be understood to refer to the master list of TBX data categories. The website will be updated and the obsolete term ‘TBX Default’ will no longer be mentioned except in historical notes.

TBX is expressed in an XML file, whereby TBX 2.0 listed the root element of the file as ‘martif’. Whenever you receive a TBX file, please check the value of the type attribute on the root element. For example, in <martif type='TBX' xml:lang='en'> the type is simply ‘TBX’.

In the new version of the standard, the value of the type attribute must be the name of a TBX dialect, for example <tbx type='TBX-Basic' xml:lang='en'>

Each dialect name is associated with a clear definition of that dialect expressed as a set of one or more modules. Each module clearly indicates which data categories are allowed, at which levels in the TBX data model, and with what values.

TBX 2008 (2.0) was expected to be constrained by a special schema called an XCS file. The new (3.0) version provides dialect-specific XML schemas to constrain TBX files. This change will address the single most common complaint about the previous version of TBX: if there is no XCS file associated with a TBX document instance, you don’t know what to expect. In the new version there is no XCS file; there is a dialect name associated with a known schema, so you do know what to expect.

You can find out about that dialect on the Dialects tab of this (the TBXinfo) website.

HOW CAN TBX BE USED?

• Archiving the information in a termbase
  • To support future software change
• Exchanging information between systems (three examples)
  • Authoring (send monolingual information from a termbase to an authoring tool)
  • Translation (send a subset of the information from a termbase to a translator)
  • Data mining (export most/all information from a termbase for analysis using XML)
• Guiding the design of a new termbase for interoperability

For more information about TBX please see the posted content of this website.

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