IEC TC 1: Terminology

Scope of TC 1:
To oversee the development and permanent maintenance of the IEC 60050 series, i.e., the International Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV, also known as Electropedia, the “IEV Online”, in reference to the website http://www.electropedia.org/) in accordance with its scope.

To develop and maintain the "General concepts" parts of the IEV.
To work with the other IEC and ISO/IEC committees

• to provide assistance and methodological advice on all matters relating to IEC and ISO/IEC terminology, and
• to integrate their terms and definitions that fall within the scope in the IEV, and in so doing to ensure to the greatest extent possible the correctness of the result (e.g., that the IEV terminological entries are consistent with each other, that each concept is identified by a single preferred term and different concepts are identified by distinct terms, and that the structural principles on which the IEV is based and other rules specified in the IEC Supplement to the ISO/IEC Directives, Annex SJ, are respected).

To work with the IEC TC 1 Officers to support and coordinate IEC's activities relating to terminology and to ensure that the IEV meets its goal.

Scope of the IEV:

The goal of the IEV is the standardization of the terms and definitions, in English and French, of internationally accepted concepts in all fields of activity of the IEC (as defined on http://www.iec.ch/). All standards within the IEV (IEC 60050 series) are horizontal publications in accordance with IEC Guide 108. Owing to the fact that the fields of activity of the IEC evolve over time, the content of the IEV is reviewed and extended on an ongoing basis, e.g., to incorporate new fields of activity.

The IEV is “standardization-oriented”, and its primary goal is to help the standards' writers to prepare standards, and the standards' users to understand and implement them. Secondarily it is intended to be of use to the translators of technical texts, in technical literature, in teaching, in technical specifications and in commercial exchanges.

It is not intended to cover all the concepts used in the various IEC standards, and is not meant to be a treatise on electrical engineering, but is rather a general purpose vocabulary, giving

• the terms and definitions for the basic and reference concepts, and
• for each domain covered by other committees, the terms and definitions that give the general (or system) engineer an overview of the techniques used by these committees and to allow interoperability with other technologies and standards.

Several IEC National Committees provide terms and definitions in their own languages for all or some of the definitions in the IEV. This is currently managed through the IEC Secretariat.

Evolution:

TC 1 through its Advisory Group 1 (AG 1) investigated the needs of both the IEC community and the outside users. The results of the online Survey on Electropedia (the “IEV Online”) — How do you use it today? How would you like to use it tomorrow? show that the great majority of respondents are generally satisfied with the current state of Electropedia, do not identify specific use-related or user-related criticalities, and only suggest incremental improvements in terms of a better and richer content together with a suggestion to include textbook writers and teachers in the target group of the IEV. There was also a proposal to add definitions in languages other than English and French; this functionality was added in late 2022. A few definitions in other languages are already in the IEV. This should have no impact on the scope of other committees but could have a positive impact on their work activities.

The 2021 edition of the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2, was amended to introduce the idea of “inclusive terminology”: a vocabulary is compliant with the principles of inclusive terminology if it is acceptable to everyone, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, skin colour, religion, etc. Most terms have a neutral meaning; the critical condition is that a vocabulary shall avoid terms whose meaning is felt as offensive or derogatory, called “excluding terms”. 

TC 1 carried out a survey (AC/23/2021) to ask for the contribution of IEC NCs and TCs and SCs to acquire opinions on the subject. The answers to this survey were circulated in 1/2506/INF. The IEC and ISO governing bodies agreed on the importance of developing jointly the guidance on inclusive terminology and issued a call for experts and Co-Convenors in AC/19/2022 for a Joint Advisory Group (JAG) on Inclusive Terminology. The group was formed early 2023, including a few TC 1 members. The JAG has delivered its report and recommendations in Q2 of 2024. The SMB agreed to extend the mandate of the JAG on Inclusive Terminology for another year with a renewed mandate. The JAG provided a report and requested an additional extension (SMB/8426/R) which the SMB approved (SMB/8426A/RV) in June 2025.

TC 1 Officers

Chair: Mr Joakim Grafström, Sweden

Secretary: Mr Svetozar Kapusta, IEC Secretariat

Assistant Secretary: Mrs Meriem Naimi, France

Assistant Secretary: Mrs Shuo Wang, China

Working Groups

WG 6: Terminology coordination and deduplication

Maintenance Teams

MT 100: Fundamental concepts

MT 300: International Electrotechnical Vocabulary – Electrical and electronic measurements and measuring instruments

Joint Working Groups

JWG 2: Joint Working Group to undertake the development of an IEV part on terminology relating to the circular economy (in particular material efficiency) linked to TC 56, TC 111, TC 61

Advisory Groups

AG 1: Advisory Group concerning the coordination, planning and steering of work to ensure that the Electropedia remains fit for purpose

AG 4: TC 1 Chair's Advisory Group

Ad-Hoc Groups

ahG 5: IEC Guide 128 Terminology Development

Joint Maintenance Teams

JMT 441: Joint Maintenance Team to undertake the revision of IEC 60050-441 Ed 2 “Switchgear, controlgear and fuses”

Joint Project Teams

 JPT 3: IEV part on terminology relating to systems, smart and digital linked to SyC LVDC, SyC Smart Cities, SyC COMM, SyC Smart Energy, SyC SM

SDB Teams

 SDB Team 60050: SDB team for IEV

Effective communication is more important than ever before in today's IEC in which we are increasingly moving towards a multiplicity and convergence of technologies, and ever-increasing needs for inter-operability.

Standards communicate provisions, and the communication of these provisions is primarily through the use of natural language (in our case English and French). Definitions are communication tools, and terms are the representations by which that communication is effected.

To ensure within the IEC community that the message understood is identical to that being communicated, the IEV needs to be comprehensive (i.e., to cover all IEC technical domains), and to provide a central resource which, to the greatest extent possible, permits precise, concise and unambiguous communication.

Note regarding the effectiveness of standards to the assessment of regulatory compliance: The IEV standards are not related directly to this topic.

The likely customers of the IEC 60050 standards and Electropedia web site are the IEC committees (and in particular experts responsible for the drafting of standards), the IEC National Committees, legal and regulatory authorities, trade and customs organizations, industry and other standards' users, translators, textbook writers and teachers, and the general public.

For clause E. SDGs below: IEC 60050 as a whole will help to pursue all SDGs as TC 1 publications do not directly support SDGs, but indirectly through the TCs that develop and use the terminology.

The current trends in the field of knowledge management include the increasing use of ontologies and automatically searchable and processable information structures, requirements for cross-domain and cross-organization harmonization of terminology and sharing of resources, open data, etc.

By its nature, the IEV is relevant to the systems approach. It is an enabler for inter- and intra-domain communication, and impacts all IEC committees.

In some technical domains, there is also a strong connection with ISO, as well as with other organizations (e.g., the CIE, the IAEA, etc.).

In addition to the need for common terminology, some standards experts have requested that the IEC and other organization terminology resources be accessible through a common point of entry.

IEC/TC 1/JPT 3 is responsible for terminology relating to systems, smart and digital.

For any IEV terminological entry that is judged to need validation with respect to conformity assessment aspects, advice from the CAB secretary is sought through the TC 1 Technical Officer.