1．Movement toward a Standardized Nursing Language and its Background

　Movement toward the development of a standardized nursing language has been continuous and evolving. Since the first conference on the classification of nursing diagnosis was held in St. Louis, Missouri (Gebbie & Lavin, ¹⁹⁷⁴⁾, there have been a series of classifications systems, data sets and nomenclatures generated to organize and define nursing language. Currently, the challenge has been to link these systems into a language system that can be used by nurses around the world. This challenge is intensified by the fact that as a discipline nursing lacks consensus around basic philosophical questions such as“WHAT IS NURSING?”As a result, nursing practice is often defined and described by actions nurses perform (that is what nurses do) rather than how nurses think.