Relabel Core Conepts

1 Requirements

ILIAS' beauty is somewhat obscured by awkward labels of core concepts. Many terms are rather technical. We should get better labels to replace those terms.

People in ILIAS trainings are positively appalled by the terms Personal Desktop, Repository and Object.
For starters look at moodle or fronter or any other system.
 
In my trainings I only use the term Werkzeug instead of Objekt. People are so much more relaxed, they pick up the term and are easy with it.
 
Please consider!

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Not scheduled yet (will be set by Jour Fixe)
• Funding: Required / Partly funded by / Funded by ... (please indicate if you have funding for feature)
• Maintainer: (will be set by Jour Fixe)
• Implementation of the feature is done by (company, developer)
• Contract settled: (fill in "Yes" if a contract is already settled, otherwise "No" )
• Tested by / status: (name, e-mail), (status information set after implementation)

3 Additional Information

Contact the following persons if you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding:

• Information about concept: Alexandra Tödt
• Information about funding: (name, e-mail)
• Information about implementation: (name, e-mail)

4 Discussion

JF 7 Jul 2014: We agree that the vocabulary in ILIAS could be improved. Since this is a very fundamental issue (at least the terms discussed above), we would like to invite everyone to participate in the discussion and to provide suggestions. If we find a common agreement on remaning these concepts, this could be done in 4.6, but not in 4.5 anymore.

CK 16 08 2014: I like the suggestions, except for renaming 'objects' to 'tools'. I think a short and generic label like 'objects' is appropriate here.
 
However I suggest to SWITCH (or change) the naming of 'object-reference' and 'object-link', because they are currently the wrong way around IMO. It would make so much sense to rename "linking objects" into "referencing objects" - because of REF-IDs. It's strange that currently an "object-link" gets a new reference-id but an "object-reference" gets a whole new object-id but behaves like a link (=redirect). => There is obviously a naming collision between the concept of "reference-ids" and "object-references". In a lot of cases people have to work with reference- and/or object-ids, so this collision is quite confusing. Also the term "linking" is used in an uncommon way (cmp. Internet-Links or Links in Microsoft Operating Systems - where the link is not the same as the linked object). Even ILIAS uses the term "linking" in the more common way in the page editor (internal / external links). This is the second naming collision (at least in english - but not so much in german). IMO it would be best to switch the naming to avoid both collisions.
 
Note: In UNIX the naming would be "hard link" vs. "soft link" / "symbolic link". For the discussion it should be helpful to use these terms temporarilly.
 
Current Situation:
Soft-Link: Reference - e.g. course-reference
Hard-Link: Link - e.g. scorm-link
 
Proposal 1 (switching terms)
a) Soft-Link: Link - e.g. course-link + category-link (instead of reference)
b) Hard-Link: Reference - e.g. scorm-reference, test-reference (instead of link)
- PRO: No collisions + the term "reference" perfectly matches the concept of reference ids (which even users sometimes have to deal with!)
- CON: Reference is a clumsy word and probably not so common
 
Proposal 2 (use only one new term: redirect)
a) Soft-Link: Redirect / Umleitung - e.g. course-redirect+ category-redirect (instead of reference)
b) Hard-Link: Link / Verknüpfung - e.g. scorm-link, test-link (as before)
- PRO: No (strong) collisions, no clumsy words, not a big change for people used to ILIAS
- CON: Still a minor mismatch of the concept of reference ids and object-links (not so obvious to end users)

HL., 19. Aug. 2014:
We generally agree, but we also hav some comments:
 
The wording "Magazin" should be replaced, but do "we" only have "Learning Ressources" in the repository? No. ILIAS (Integrated Learning, Information and "Arbeits"- Cooperation System) is also used for collaborative groups, for public surveys, and much more.
 
"Activities and Ressources" is too long, "Tools" or "Werkzeuge" is a good wording.
 
Teilnehmer instead of Mitglied is not a good choice. Two years ago, we decided to tackle the "Generisches Maskulinum" in ILIAS. So we should only change this wording if we also have a concept "Gendergerechte Sprache".

5 Implementation

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