This volume comprises contributions originally presented at the 15th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes held at the University of Bergamo on 29 August - 2 September 2005. The volume is divided into four parts: Approaches to Terminological Theories; Terms in Discourse; Knowledge Elicitation, Ordering and Management; Term extraction and terminographical work. The research presented in the various contributions to this volume clearly indicates that terminology as an inter- and transdisciplinary field of knowledge is firmly developing its theoretical foundations and practical applications in accordance with and within the framework of its overall goal: to ensure and to augment the quality of communication with professional content.

This handbook gives an overview of language for special purposes (LSP) in scientific, professional and other contexts, with particular focus on teaching and training. It provides insights into research paradigms, theories and methods while also highlighting the practical use of LSPs in concrete discourse situations. The volume is transdisciplinary oriented with a firm basis in the language sciences, including terminology, knowledge transfer, multilingual and cross-cultural exchange.

As the most advanced human thinking is expressed by special language there are exciting possibilities for research in which philosophical, semantic, semiotic, text-linguistic and pragmatic approaches are utilized.

Based on her study of Greek pottery sherds and vases and on her profound hands-on knowledge of pottery construction techniques, including experiments with the potting of Attic shapes, Toby Schreiber describes how ancient Greek potters constructed their vases. Drawn in large part from vases and fragments in the collection of the Getty Museum, the many photographs that accompany the text show how much even seemingly insignificant sherds may reveal about technique when studied by someone knowledgeable about potting. The drawings - all done by the author - demonstrate step by step with admirable clarity how the potter executed his craft. Written by a master potter, this is a book both for those who know little or nothing about potting techniques and for those who already have an understanding of these matters.

Researchers in areas such as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to realize that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. In all these areas, attention is now being focused on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages used to represent information. The clearest example of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up around the project of the Semantic Web. And, as the need for integrating research in these different fields arises, so does the realization that strong principles for building well-founded ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based solutions. The tools of formal ontology address precisely these needs, but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical tools to the domain of information systems. ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations. The purpose of FOIS is to provide a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a unified effort towards solving the problems of ontology, with an eye to both theoretical issues and concrete applications. This book contains a wide range of areas, all of which are important to the development of formal ontologies.

A new ontology development paradigm has started its emphasis lies on the reuse and possible subsequent reengineering of knowledge resources, on the collaborative and argumentative ontology development, and on the building of ontology networks this new trend is the opposite of building new ontologies from scratch. To help ontology developers in this new paradigm, it is important to provide strong methodological support.However, up to date, there are no methodological approaches that help ontology developers to build large ontologies embedded in ontology networks in complex settings where distributed teams could