In modeling, and especially in data modeling, a difficulty that frequently occurs is the variety of terms used for information objects in large companies. For example, the purchasing department's definition of the term order differs from the production department's definition of the same term. However, acceptance of the information gathered can be substantially increased by the use of consistent terminology throughout the company or the department. For this reason, ARIS Method provides the so-called Technical terms model that may be used for managing the various terms in the form of a synonym management for data objects, as well as for specifying the relationships that exist between the objects of data models (entity type, relationship type, ...) and the technical terms used within the company.
In order to represent these relationships, the 'Technical term' object type was introduced. You can thus assign multiple technical terms to every information object of the data model. The following figure illustrates an example.
Technical terms can be interrelated and may be arranged in a hierarchy. The following figure illustrates how connection types are used between technical terms.
The technical terms defined in the technical terms model can also be used in other model types that contain information objects, for example, in process chains for illustrating a function's input/output data.