The Cyber Education Project and IT IAS Curriculum

Abstract

The Cyber Education Project (CEP) is an initiative to develop undergraduate curriculum guidelines and a case for accreditation for a baccalaureate in "Cyber Sciences" (The Cyber Education Project, 2015). The Learning Outcomes Working Group (LOWG) is in the process of creating a "taxonomy" and a set of "learning outcomes" for this baccalaureate program. In this document we examine concepts from the disciplines of linguistics, terminology management, knowledge management and ontology development that help illuminate the challenges involved with creating and managing the vocabulary we use to communicate about technical topics. We discuss how the concepts of ambiguity and terminology apply to the CEP and the issues of creating and managing a controlled vocabulary to support a field of study. We discuss the magnitude of the LOWG work by providing general characteristics of 31 glossaries and 5 different taxonomies or Bodies of Knowledge proposed by "Cyber Security" related organizations. These include the IAS knowledge areas from IT2008 and CS2013 which have begun to diverge. Finally we conclude with some suggestions of how to approach the creating and managing a vocabulary for Cyber Sciences without losing the connections to the source disciplines and how those source disciplines. IT curriculum must maintain consistency with the evolution of the Cyber Sciences or risk becoming an isolated silo whose IAS curriculum is isolated from an evolving Cyber Sciences community.