WG 15 - JTC 1

ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG 15

JTC 1 Vocabulary

August 2026

Overview

ISO/IEC JTC 1 WG 15 is part of a joint technical committee (JTC 1) between two international standardisation organisations:

ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG 15 was established by Resolution 15 of the November 2022 JTC 1 plenary based on work done by JTC 1 AG 18.

Terms of Reference

The Terms of Reference of the Working Group are as follows:

1. Establish objectives, goals, and a project timeline for the revision of ISO/IEC 2382 (2015 edition);

2. Establish techniques, process, and procedure for the WG activity, such as reusing existing practice, where practicable, for vocabulary maintenance, technical review, and production;

3. Inform itself of and coordinate with the existing and substantial JTC 1 SCs’/WGs’ vocabulary efforts;

4. Establish individual term quality, life-cycle, etc. categories such that (1) new terms can be developed; (2) existing terms can be maintained; (3) stabilized terms require no maintenance; (4) deprecated terms are discouraged for future use; and (5) historical terms (in context) provide appropriate framing and definition yet are discouraged for current use;

5. Develop a marketing and packaging plan for the JTC 1 terminology that includes ISO/IEC 2382 standard and, possibly other SC/WG-related terminology standards work and work product;

6. Revise JTC 1 SD 20, Best Practices Guide for IT Vocabulary, as appropriate.

Since it’s formation, WG 15 has also been tasked with defining the term “information technology”.

Officers

Role	Officer	Country
Convenor	Frank FARANCE	US
Secretary	Ray GATES	CA
JTC 1 Secretary support	Sally SEITZ	US

Members

WG 15 has 34 registered members (not counting the officers) from 9 national bodies, 14 liaison representatives and 8 document monitors. (Note: Some of the liaison representatives are also registered members.)

National bodies

The following national bodies are represented:

France (AFNOR), United States (ANSI), Germany (DIN), Luxembourg (ILNAS), Japan (JICS), Republic of Korea (KATS), Australia (SA), China (SAC) and Canada (SCC).

Liaisons

The following JTC 1 subcommittees are represented:

SC 6, SC 17, SC 23, SC 24, SC 27, SC 36, SC 42

The following ISO technical committees are represented:

ISO/TC 211

Collective experience

Between them, the members and liaison representatives have experience in the following committees and working groups:

JTC 1: SC 6, SC 7, SC 17, SC 23, SC 24, SC 27, SC 29, SC 32, SC 36, SC 38, SC 41, SC 42, SC 43, WG 11, WG 13, AG 19, CG 1
ISO: TC 37, TC 46, TC 46/SC 11, TC 211, TC 309
IEC: TC 1/JPT 3, TC 3, SyC Smart Cities, JSEG Metaverse
ITU-T: FG-MV, FG-DPM, FG-AINN, SG 17

Background to ISO/IEC 2382

ISO/IEC 2382 is a multi-part standard whose development started circa 1972 in TC 97, which pre-dates the merger and formation of JTC 1. ISO/IEC 2382 is a terminology standard (per ISO/IEC Guide 2), which is called a “Vocabulary”, and it includes terms and definitions relating to the fields of, initially data processing, then information processing, and subsequently information technology. The first edition was developed in the 1970s, initially with 12 parts. Some parts were revised and others were added in the 1980s and 1990s resulting in 32 parts by 1999. Each part focused on a particular sub-category of information technology. Two other parts were added in 2008 and 2012. The 2015 edition is based upon the work of the JTC 1 Vocabulary Maintenance Team, circa 2007-2013, that included merging first 32 parts into a single consolidated part, and the definitions aligned with the updated ISO 10241-1 guidance on presentations of term entries in standards, and the ISO House Style of the time. In 2024, ISO and IEC have issued guidance on Inclusive Terminology, which will be applied.

Since 2015, information technology has continued to evolve, and new terminology has been developed in new and existing subject areas, so WG 15 has been established to determine a process to update the vocabulary and to make recommendations on packaging and maintenance. At present, ISO/IEC 2382 Information Technology – Vocabulary (ITV) has approximately 5000 entries.

Meeting schedule

The working group has held semi-annual meetings spread over three days, three hours per day. All meetings to date have been virtual.

2023-04-03 to 2023-04-05
2023-10-10 to 2023-10-12
2024-04-02 to 2024-04-04
2024-10-01 to 2024-10-03
2025-03-04 to 2025-03-06
2025-09-02 to 2025-09-04
2026-02-04 to 2026-02-06

The next semi-annual meeting is scheduled for:

2026-09-01 to 2026-09-03.

In between these semi-annual meetings, task group meetings are held to progress the work. These were initially monthly, but since January 2025 they have been semi-monthly.

Progress to date

The WG has:

been reviewing and using existing TC 37 methodology, e.g., ISO 704 principles and term formation process, ISO 1087 terminology terms, ISO 10241-1 term entries; and TC 46 methodology ISO 25964-* multilingual techniques;
developed a data model documenting requirements for terminology management;
investigated possible tools for use in terminology management;
developed a high-level work plan;
drafted a definition of “information technology”, as requested by JTC 1;
drafted revisions to the definitions of “data”, “metadata” and “information”;
initiated work on taxonomies and concept systems to be used to organize the revision to ISO/IEC 2382;
developed guidance on splinter definitions and homograph control;
developed training in advanced techniques for terminology standardization, and delivered the training to other WGs (e.g. JTC 1/WG 13) and SCs (e.g. TC 46/SC 11) on request;
reviewed most of the over 3300 existing ISO/IEC 2382 terms entries and added over 700 new term entries;
initiated 16 projects (see below);
distributed 8 WDs so far to JTC 1 SCs for review and comment.

Proposed structure of the new ISO/IEC 2382

This edition of ISO/IEC 2382 is proposed to be organized into multiple parts, which have been grouped into seven categories: (1) General, (2) Storage, (3) Computing, (4) Input/Output, (5) Network and Communication, (6) Application Areas, (7) IT Engineering Processes.

The following are the ISO/IEC 2382 parts organized by this seven-prong taxonomy.

Category 1: General

This General category is broad in that it covers broad applicability across JTC 1 activities, including technologies and their IT applications that JTC 1 standardizes. This category includes fundamental terms and some of the core sciences of IT: data science, information theory, information science, and quantum information.

ISO/IEC 2382-1 Fundamental terms

Scope: Fundamental terms and concepts used across IT, JTC 1 activities, stakeholders, and applications. This vocabulary is intended to be broadly used, both inside and outside JTC 1, with respect to information technology and its applications.

ISO/IEC 2382-5 Data science

Scope: Terms and concepts regarding the practice that uses scientific methods, processes, and systems to extract information and knowledge from data.

Note: Data management and Data governance are in Part 4, Data analytics is in Part 6.

ISO/IEC 2382-16 Information theory, information science, and quantum information

Scope: Terms and concepts related to the fields of information theory, information science, and quantum information, including their subfields

Category 2: Storage

The Storage category addresses data and programs-as-data stored in various forms, such as registers, cache memory, main memory, disk drives, storage media, and storage systems. Fundamentally, all storage components store signifiers because, fundamentally, all computing processes signifiers, e.g. computers don’t understand arithmetic, but they perform signifier processing that behaves as-if they understand arithmetic operations.

Data necessarily involves signifiers, which can include several kinds of representation frameworks, such as analog, digital, quantum, and others. Information involves meaning (e.g. provided by contexts and concept systems), which can be layered upon data to enrich the data. Knowledge (abstraction and organization of information) can be a higher order product, which can be represented and stored. Regardless of level, scale, structure, complexity, and parallelism, information and knowledge need to be reified (making something abstract more concrete or real) as data for storage, processing, and transforming for input/output, and communication.

These parts of ISO/IEC 2382 address aspects of Storage, its technologies, usage, and applications.

ISO/IEC 2382-4 Data management and data governance

Scope: Terms and concepts regarding data, metadata, information, and their representation, semantics, structure, processing, management, and governance.

ISO/IEC 2382-12 Data media, data storage, and storage parallelism

Scope: Terms and concepts related to media for digital representation and data storage equipment, and their associated software or firmware.

ISO/IEC 2382-17 Databases and file systems

Scope: Terms and concepts related to media for digital representation, storage systems for digital representation, and automated storage systems for searching, storing, and retrieving data, such as file systems, databases, and large data storage infrastructure; large scale unstructured, partially-structured, and structured data.

Category 3: Computing

The Computing category addresses computation in various forms (manual, automatic, etc.) at various scales (circuits, processors, massively parallel systems, etc.) of various kinds of data (conceptual, analog, digital, quantum, etc.) using various forms of expression (mathematics, logic systems, notation, special languages, artificial languages, formal languages, programming languages, etc.), and various bindings (application programming interfaces, application binary interfaces, etc.).

These parts of ISO/IEC 2382 address aspects of Computing, their technologies, expression, usage, applications, and environments.

ISO/IEC 2382-2 Mathematical operations

Scope: Terms and concepts regarding operations, operands, operators, functions, objects, and fields of study across mathematics and related sciences. This includes arithmetic, number theory, representation systems, algebra, abstract algebra, linear algebra, calculus, analysis, logic systems, geometry, topology, etc.

ISO/IEC 2382-22 Calculations and computations

Scope: Terms and concepts related to the calculations and computations of information systems and their subsystems, functional units, components, and interfaces, including the operations and instructions within their processing units, such as calculators, machine instructions, numerical processing, functions, and services.

ISO/IEC 2382-19 Analog computing

Scope: Terms and concepts related to analog computing, continuous (non-discrete) data, and supporting systems, functional units, components, interfaces, and data representation.

ISO/IEC 2382-3 Digital circuits

Scope: Terms and concepts used in digital circuits and computer architecture.

ISO/IEC 2382-11 Computer processing units and compute parallelism

Scope: Terms and concepts related to systems, subsystems, functional units, components, and interfaces of processing units for computation and its parallelism for their functions, services, actions, operations, interactions, and communications.

ISO/IEC 2382-15 Programming languages

Scope: Terms and concepts related to the construction, description, understanding, interpretation, and use of special languages, artificial languages, formal languages, controlled languages, and other languages expressing and affording automatic computation, programs, and subunits of programs.

ISO/IEC 2382-7 Computer programming and environments

Scope: Terms and concepts regarding programmers use and application of programming languages and the environments in which they operation (e.g. operating systems, embedded systems, free standing, bare metal).

ISO/IEC 2382-6 Data analytics

Scope: Terms and concepts regarding systems including data analytics, data warehousing, business intelligence, visualization and adding insights to data.

Category 4: Input/Output

The Input/Output category addresses transformations of data to and from the world beyond a computation system, e.g. sensory and perceptive transformations from various input devices or methods; actuators and expressions to various output devices or methods; and interactions with other systems.

These parts of ISO/IEC 2382 address aspects of Input/Output, their peripheral equipment, devices, functional units, technologies, usage, applications, interactions, and interfaces.

ISO/IEC 2382-30 Notation and symbology

Scope: Terms and concepts related to signs, signifiers of any communication mode, notation, and symbology systems.

ISO/IEC 2382-38 Peripheral equipment.

Scope: Terms and concepts related to systems, subsystems, functional units, components, and interfaces that can communicate or interact with a particular computer.

ISO/IEC 2382-13 Computer graphics and multimedia

Scope: Terms and concepts related to bitstreams representing, transmitting, receiving, presenting, sensing, perceiving, and coordinating, perceivable objects for conveying communication in one or more of the human senses, such as hearing, seeing, touch, smell, taste, and one or more of the human expressions, such as speech, gestures, motor actions.

ISO/IEC 2382-35 User interfaces

Scope: Terms and concepts related to users interacting with IT systems, their subsystems, functional units, and components; their usability and ergonomics; and their applications

Category 5: Network and Communication

The Network and Communication category is a sub-element of Input/Output. This category is similar to Input and Output in that communications are beyond a particular computation system; however, unlike Input/Output, the data is not transformed to or from a different form (e.g. auditory or visual), but merely transmitted to or received from another system. The distinction between mere communication and computer networking is that the latter has underlying communication infrastructure that can scale up to extremely large, global, disparate, and heterogeneous systems.

These parts of ISO/IEC 2382 address aspects of Network and Communication, their infrastructure, functional units, components, provisioning, connectivity, multiplexing, naming, addressing, adaption, network management, load management, availability, recovery, adaptation, technologies, usage, applications, interactions, and interfaces.

Among these parts, they are further organized, as described by the ISO/IEC OSI 7-layer model:

ISO/IEC 2382-9 Data communications

Scope: Terms and concepts related to the sending and receiving of data, its infrastructure, parameters, and supporting facilities, and the interfaces to systems, functional units, components, and other data communications.

Part 9 covers the layer 1 and 2 services but does not directly address a large number of connections typical of a computer network.

ISO/IEC 2382-25 Computer networks and network protocols

Scope: Terms and concepts related to fundamental network elements (e.g. network, node), their topology (e.g. point-to-point, bus, ring, star), their multi-access sharing (e.g. token, CSMA/CD), connection mode (connection-oriented, connection-less), switching mode (packet, circuit), STM/ATM, and other networking characteristics.

Note: Peering relationships are in Part 26 because they are not exactly a topology.

Part 25 addresses the layers 2-4 services that are necessary to support a large-scale and global computer network.

ISO/IEC 2382-26 Network architecture and applications

Scope: Terms and concepts related to large-scale global computer networking, their architecture, and their applications.

Part 26 addresses the large-scale approach and layering for network infrastructure (layers 1 through 7), and their applications.

ISO/IEC 2382-18 Distributed data processing

Scope: Terms and concepts related to data processing and information processing across multiple communication systems, computation systems, storage systems, heterogeneous systems, cloud computing, and organizations’ systems.

Part 18 covers distributed networks, computing, and storage, including network parallelism.

Category 6: Application Areas

The Application Areas category addresses the application of the more fundamental aspects of the Store, Compute, Input/Output and Network and Communications categories. These parts involve integrating more than one technology, technique, system, or function.

These parts of ISO/IEC 2382 address aspects of Application Areas, including the component technologies, techniques; and the application and adaption of several standardization topics.

ISO/IEC 2382-23 Text processing

Scope: Terms and concepts related to text, its processing, and supporting languages (natural, general, special, artificial, formal, controlled, phraseology, plain) and their formats, markup, processing, and presentation, including plain text, hypertext, formatting, markup, and other languages.

ISO/IEC 2382-27 Office automation and applications

Scope: Terms and concepts related to IT automation of the office and its IT uses, services, and applications.

ISO/IEC 2382-32 Electronic mail and web applications

Scope: Terms and concepts related to internet applications, such as e-mail, calendar, browsing, messaging and virtual meetings.

ISO/IEC 2382-24 Computer integrated manufacturing and automation

Scope: Terms and concepts related to manufacturing and its integration and their automation, including computer-based planning and engineering, control systems, and their functional units, and components.

Note: Need to check overlap with system-based engineering tools in part 20 – emphasis here should be on production operations.

ISO/IEC 2382-21 Cyber-physical systems and interfaces

Scope: Term and concepts related to the integration of computation, networking, and physical processes and their supporting infrastructure, systems, functional units, components, and interfaces of produces, processes, and services.

ISO/IEC 2382-28 Artificial intelligence

Scope: Terms and concepts related to artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence, including its stakeholders, infrastructure, services, deployment, management, and governance.

ISO/IEC 2382-31 Machine learning

Scope: Terms and concepts related to machine learning, training, computation, and analysis.

ISO/IEC 2382-29 Natural language recognition and processing

Scope: Terms and concepts related to natural language processing, recognition, understanding, and generation in information systems.

ISO/IEC 2382-33 Robotics and computer vision

Scope: Terms and concepts related to autonomous and semi-autonomous systems that sense, express, and interact with the real world and mechanized work, such as visual systems, robotic systems, and agent-based systems.

ISO/IEC 2382-34 Automated reasoning

Scope: Terms and concepts related to computation systems supporting automated reasoning, ontologies (information science – knowledge representation), ontology (philosophy – being), expert systems, automatic logic systems, and their supporting technologies.

ISO/IEC 2382-36 Learning education and training

Scope: SC 36-specific. Not being updated by WG 15.

ISO/IEC 2382-37 Biometrics

Scope: SC 37-specific. Not being updated by WG 15.

Category 7: IT Engineering Processes

The IT Engineering Processes category addresses societal needs including people and organizations, and their involvement with the governance of IT, management of IT, technologies, techniques, and systems, with respect to their products, processes and services.

ISO/IEC 2382-20 Systems and software engineering

Scope: Terms and concepts related to processes, supporting tools, and supporting technologies for the engineering of systems, products, and services, including those which are predominately software.

ISO/IEC 2382-14 Reliability, maintainability, availability, and trustworthiness

Scope: Terms and concepts related to quantitative and qualitative aspects of assurance and confidence with respect to products, processes, and services in information technology.

ISO/IEC 2382-10 Operating techniques, IT service management and governance of IT

Scope: Terms and concepts related to governing, managing and operating information systems and their environments and business processes.

ISO/IEC 2382-8 IT security

Scope: Terms and concepts related to components, methods, application, techniques, management, and management systems for security of information technology systems, including their access, communication, protection, confidentiality, privacy, integrity, modification, and destruction, and their controls, detection, response, and reporting.

Active projects

The following projects have been formally initiated:

ISO/IEC 2382-1 Fundamental terms

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD circulated 2026-02-09 for response by 2026-04-10
CD target date 2026-11-30
DIS target date 2027-11-30
IS target date 2028-11-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-4 Data management and data governance

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD circulated 2026-02-27 for response by 2026-04-30.
CD target date 2026-11-30
DIS target date 2027-11-30
IS target date 2028-11-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-3 Digital circuits

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD circulated 2026-03-13 for response by 2026-05-11
CD target date 2026-09-30
DIS target date 2027-09-30
IS target date 2028-09-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-16 Information theory

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD circulated 2026-03-13 for response by 2026-05-11
CD target date 2026-09-30
DIS target date 2027-09-30
IS target date 2028-09-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-19 Analog computing

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD circulated 2026-03-13 for response by 2026-05-11.
CD target date 2026-09-30
DIS target date 2027-09-30
IS target date 2028-09-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-22 Calculations and computations

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD circulated 2026-03-13 for response by 2026-05-11
CD target date 2026-09-30
DIS target date 2027-09-30
IS target date 2028-09-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-12 Data media, data storage, and storage parallelism

Project initiated 2026-05-10
WD circulated 2026-05-22 for response by 2026-07-20
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-04-30
IS target date 2029-04-30
project limit date 2029-05-10

ISO/IEC 2382-13 Computer graphics and multimedia

Project initiated 2026-05-10
WD circulated 2026-05-22 for response by 2026-07-20
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-05-10
IS target date 2029-05-10
project limit date 2029-05-10

ISO/IEC 2382-38 Peripheral equipment

Project initiated 2026-05-19
WD circulated 2026-05-22 for response by 2026-07-20
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-05-10
IS target date 2029-05-10
project limit date 2029-05-10

ISO/IEC 2382-7 Computer programming and environments

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD under development.
CD target date 2026-11-30
DIS target date 2027-11-30
IS target date 2028-11-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-15 Programming languages

Project initiated 2025-12-11
WD under development.
CD target date 2026-11-30
DIS target date 2027-11-30
IS target date 2028-11-30
project limit date 2028-12-11

ISO/IEC 2382-9 Data communications

Project initiated 2026-05-10
WD under development.
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-04-30
IS target date 2029-04-30
project limit date 2029-05-10

ISO/IEC 2382-17 Databases and file systems

Project initiated 2026-05-19
WD under development.
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-05-19
IS target date 2029-05-19
project limit date 2029-05-19

ISO/IEC 2382-18 Distributed data processing

Project initiated 2026-05-19
WD under development.
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-05-19
IS target date 2029-05-19
project limit date 2029-05-19

ISO/IEC 2382-25 Computer networks and network protocols

Project initiated 2026-05-19
WD under development.
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-05-19
IS target date 2029-05-19
project limit date 2029-05-19

ISO/IEC 2382-26 Network architecture and applications

Project initiated 2026-05-19
WD under development.
CD target date 2027-05-31
DIS target date 2028-05-19
IS target date 2029-05-19
project limit date 2029-05-19