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JULY/AUGUST 2021
LIGHTING JOURNAL
LANGUAGE OF LIGHT With new publications, a digital version of its ‘International Lighting Vocabulary’, a free guide on visual impairment and a virtual conference in September, the CIE has been keeping busy during the past year By John O’Hagan
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s most ILP members will probably be aware, CIE-UK is the UK national committee of the International Commission on Illumination or CIE (from the French ‘Commission Internationale de l´Éclairage’). The ILP is a sponsoring organisation member of CIE, and therefore this is an update on some of the CIE’s latest, and upcoming, activity during what has been a challenging 12 months. A significant recent publication from
CIE has been the latest edition of the International Lighting Vocabulary. In the world of development of technical publications, terminology is where it all begins. This publication provides a set of agreed definitions and terms for concepts common to a field, reducing the level of ambiguity associated with words and sentences. Before starting work on technical documents, experts first must agree on the terminology, so that everyone understands the concepts which are referred to.
This is particularly important when disciplines come together to discuss topics that overlap their fields. Light and lighting, both science and application, brings together psychology, physiology, photobiology, vision science, engineering, physics, horticulture, and architecture. In the CIE, terminology has therefore always been a key subject. For example, a century ago, in 1921, attendees at the 5th Session of the CIE began to discuss the publication of a lighting vocabulary.
