Towards Integration of Perspectives in the Terminology of the Interdisciplinary Domain ‘Smart Urban Coastal Sustainability’

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to investigate the challenges of conceptual and terminological analysis in the process of the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field where terms from the existing domains like ecology, economy, tourism, biology, and geography are being used. The EU-CONEXUS project tackles the issue of Smart Urban Sustainable Coastal Development bringing together different types of stakeholders, specialists in various disciplines and technologies. This interdisciplinarity calls for the integration of knowledge from two or more disciplines so as to produce cognitive advancement. From the terminologists’ point of view, the interaction of disciplines is a necessary step towards the integration of (disciplinary) concepts as well as their organisation inside conceptual systems. This suggests that the interdisciplinary phenomena can be explained in new, more complex ways that single disciplines weren’t able to do before. In our analysis, we illustrated the process of extending the definition of concepts from the perspective of a single domain and adopting multiple interdisciplinary viewpoints on the same issue.