Terminological Ambiguity in the Context of Product Certification

This paper addresses the ambiguity between the terms representing the result document of a conformity assessment. Among several other terms, such a document is often referred to as a certificate of conformity in the expert communities of standardization and in legislation. This ambiguity has been identified while reviewing various textual sources within a project focusing on the digitization of such a document for legal metrology used in the European Union. This digitization is going to be realized using a unified data structure. This will allow us to semantically describe the complete content of the result document and to make it readable and interpretable for any technical application. In order to bring the data structure in line with the professional language, an appropriate term representing such a result document has to be found from a variety of similar standardized terms. A semantic analysis has been carried out for this purpose. The following publication provides an overview and the results of this analysis, with the aim of making the expert community aware of the existing ambiguity as being a possible cause for the slowing down of digitization processes.