I read about a fascinating experiment that took place at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). The goal was to tease out “jargon” in the department’s Web content and highlight that not everyone understands the terms.

Sarah Shepard, senior engineering research editor in the department, put together an anonymous survey of department employees to rate their familiarity with 50 terms they use regularly in their Web and print materials. The response rate was nearly 20% and she learned which words were the least understood.

I would like to do the same thing, but for geospatial terms. I’ve collected 36 terms and I invite our readers and the geospatial community at large to participate in our anonymous survey. For each term, you can select one of four familiarity levels:

• I'm not familiar with this word
• I've seen/heard this word, but don't know what it means
• I think I know what this means, but I'm not sure
• I know the meaning of this word

We’ll run the survey for two week, until March 20 . Then I’ll summarize the results in an upcoming article. Thanks for your help!