How groups co-ordinate their concepts and terminology: Implications for medical informatics

Conceptual and terminological systems are established and maintained by the communities who use them. This paper reports experiments which investigate the role of communication and interaction in the process. The experiments show that isolated pairs of communicators and virtual communities of intera cting pairs naturally converge on their own conceptual and terminological s ystems when confronted with a common task. The results also indicate that t he system converged on is optimal for that particular group engaged in that particular task. These findings are discussed in relation to the increasin g use of tightly coordinated medical teams and its implications for getting them to adopt standardized medical terminologies.