Word of the day: disambiguation
This week, i had occasion to have a fascinating time with an American academic who has just received a PhD from a British university and is currently studying the whole area of privacy (or lack of it) on the Internet.
He is from New York and, on the morning of 9/11, he was working some five blocks south of the World Trade Center when the two airliners brought down the twin towers. His personal account of that experience was dramatic and moving.
We then went on to discuss his current research interests and the subject of passwords came up. I mentioned my column on this subject and, in the course of the conversation, my colleague used a word that I had never heard of and which I even wondered if it existed.
He introduced to me the term disambiguation. I’ve now looked it up and, of course, it does exist. It means “the process of resolving the conflicts that arise when a single term is ambiguous”. In the context of our discussion, it referred to how we can establish a clear personal identity for use of online services.
You can learn more about the term here. It seems that there is even ‘double disambiguation’ and ‘incomplete disambiguation’! Don’t you just love academics?