The research and development project MEDTERM was a cooperation between the University of Latvia in Riga, the Institute of the Estonian Language in Tallin and the Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine at the University of Aarhus. The intention of the project was the development of a multilinguistic, internet-based dictionary supporting knowledge sharing within the medical field.

The development of the dictionary took place in two stages: First, more than 1,000 English terms within the field of epidemiology were provided with definitions, explanations and other relevant lexicographic and linguistic information. The terms were selected and translated by researchers and epidemiological experts from the University of Aarhus, the then Centre of Medical LSP and our partners in Riga and Tallinn.

After the validation and last editing of the content of the bilingual dictionaries, we established a common database for the four languages making it possible to search across languages and not only from one language to another. Thus, three bilingual dictionaries were merged into one multilingual epidemiological dictionary handling Danish, English, Estonian and Latvian.

Through the further development of the multilingual dictionary, it has shown a large potential to be a very effective tool for knowledge sharing, translation and terminology management. Due to the knowledge sharing aspect we ensure that the dictionary is a live tool for development of internal language policies and external cooperations. The users are invited to participate actively with their knowledge and by supplying the dictionary content with new entries within their particular subject field. The users share their knowledge with each other by continuously updating the dictionary with new entries, definitions and translations.

The full title of the project was 'Knowledge Sharing and Generic Terminology Management in the Field of Medicine'. It was managed by Professor Morten Pilegaard and was carried through in the period 2005 till 2006. The project was supported by the European Commission under the programme eContent.

The multilingual dictionary is being further developed under the name TermShare.