Our contribution is part of a wider research project on term variation in German and concentrates on the computational aspects of a frame-based model for term meaning representation in the technical field. We focus on the role of frames (in the sense of Frame-Based Terminology) as the semantic interface between concepts covered by a domain ontology and domain-specific terminology. In particular, we describe methods for performing frame-based corpus annotation and frame-based term extraction. The aim of the contribution is to discuss the capacity of the model to automatically acquire semantic knowledge suitable for terminographic information tools such as specialised dictionaries, and its applicability to further specialised languages.