A semantic network is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed graph consisting of vertices which represent concepts and edges which represent semantic relations between the concepts.
Semantic networks are a common type of machine-readable dictionaries.
Important semantic relations:
An example of a semantic network is WordNet, a lexical database of English.
The link and lexical structure of the Wikipedia might also be regarded as a simple example of a semantic network, with the following properties:
Such networks involve fairly loose semantic associations that are nonetheless useful for human browsing. It is possible to represent logical descriptions using semantic networks such as the Existential Graphs[?] of Charles S. Peirce or the related Conceptual Graphs[?] of John F. Sowa. These have expressive power equal to or exceeding standard first-order predicate logic. Unlike WordNet or other lexical or browsing networks, semantic networks using these can be used for reliable automated logical deduction. Some automated reasoners exploit the graph-theoretic features of the networks during processing.
"Semantic Nets" were first invented for computers by Richard H. Richens[?] of the Cambridge Language Research Unit[?] in 1956 as an "interlingua" for machine translation of natural languages. They were developed as "semantic networks" for knowledge representation and reasoning by M. Ross Quillian[?] in 1966.
On can consider a mind map to be a very free form variant of a semantic network. By using colors and pictures the emphasis is on generating a semantic net which evokes human creativity.
See also:
External links:
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump