ISO 12620 is a standard from ISO/TC 37

ISO/TC 37

ISO/TC 37 is a technical committee within the International Organization for Standardization that prepares standards and other documents concerning methodology and principles for terminology and language resources....

 which defines a Data Category Registry, a registry for registering linguistic terms used in various fields of translation

Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

, computational linguistics

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....

 and natural language processing

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

 and defining mappings both between different terms and the same terms used in different systems.

The goal of the registry is that new systems can reuse existing terminology, or at least be easily be mapped to existing terminology, to aid interoperability

Interoperability

Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together . The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to...

. To this end a number of terminologies have been added to the registry, including ones based on the General Ontology for Linguistic Description

GOLD (ontology)

GOLD is an ontology for descriptive linguistics. It gives a formalized account of the most basic categories and relations used in the scientific description of human language....

, the National Corpus of Polish

National Corpus of Polish

The National Corpus of Polish is the biggest and the most important corpus of the Polish language. A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts where one can find the typical use of a single word or a phrase, as well as their meaning and grammatical function.-Description:The National Corpus of...

 and the TermBase eXchange from the Localization Industry Standards Association

Localization Industry Standards Association

From 1990 to February 2011 the Localization Industry Standards Association or LISA was a Swiss-based trade body of concerning the translation of computer software into multiple natural languages...

.

The standard was first released as ISO 12620:1999 which was obsoleted by ISO 12620:2009. The first edition was English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

-only, the second bilingual English-French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

.

The standard is relatively low-level but is used by other standards such as Lexical Markup Framework

Lexical Markup Framework

ISO 24613:2008, Language resource management - Lexical markup framework , is the ISO International Organization for Standardization ISO/TC37 standard for natural language processing and machine-readable dictionary lexicons...

(ISO 24613:2008).