Managing graphic information in terminological knowledge bases

The cognitive shift in Linguistics has affected the way linguists, lexicographers and terminologists understand and describe specialized language, and the way they represent scientific and technical concepts. The representation of terminological knowledge, as part of our encyclopaedic knowledge about the world, is crucial in multimedia terminological knowledge bases, where different media coexist to enhance the multidimensional character of knowledge representations. However, so far little attention has been paid in Terminology and Linguistics to graphic information, including visual resources and pictorial material.
 Frame-based Terminology (Faber et al. 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) advocates a multimodal conceptual description in which the structured information in terminographic definitions meshes with visual information for a better understanding of specialized concepts. In this article, we explore the relationship between visual and textual information, and search for a principled way to select images that best represent the linguistic, conceptual and contextual information contained in terminological knowledge bases, in order to contribute to a better transfer of specialized knowledge.