Collaborative terminology management in language planning and for corporate purposes

We are discussing this morning the problem a South African participant brought up. South Africa has 11 official languages and terminology projects for language planning are undertaken by a variety of organizations, governmental, private or academic. What can one do to make sure that terminology data stored in databases of various sorts and degree of sophistication can be coordinated, maybe linked, etc. There are costly and efficient tools on the market that have their advantages and disadvantages. They are mostly easy-to use by a large number of terminologists who may be working from different locations thanks to web accessibility. They also “guide” the person who makes the entry how to proceed. On the downside of it they are often very costly. But there are also solutions that do not require a lot of money – just some knowhow of data modelling and strict consistency of how data are entered and managed. Excel is such and example and data managed this way can be quite easily imported into existing other systems.
wikis are strong in the field of collaborative work, dissemination and discussion of terminology. However, they are weak when it comes to structuring data entries. Some companies in Germany, for instance are already using a combination of Excel and wikis for their terminology work.