Semantic Unit

Summary

A Semantic Unit is a basic building block of meaning or representation that exists within the 'mind' of a party (i.e., in its knowledge).

Examples include ideas, or concepts, properties of concepts, relations between concepts, constraints over such concepts and relations, etc.

In the context of cognitive science, a semantic unit represents a distinct and well-defined element of terminology, such as a concept, a relation, a property, or any other fundamental building block that contributes to the structure and understanding of a specialized domain or subject.

Parties use terms to refer to such building blocks, and as such they are relevant to know about in the context of terminology curation. Also, terms can be grouped into terminologies.Parties may create a definition for a semantic unit by associating the criterion with the term that it uses to determine what is, and what is not, an instance (or example) of the semantic unit.

Within TEv2, semantic units can be defined in, and described by curated texts that belong to a particular scope. They can be clustered to form terminologies, for which glossaries (both machine readable and human readable) can be generated

The terminology pattern provides an overview of how this concept fits in with related concepts.

Purpose

Semantic units exist because they are somehow relevant for realizing objectives of the party that has this knowledge. Since parties rarely realize their objectives all by themselves, they will need to find ways to communicate them (their meanings) to other parties and/or actors that work for/with them, such that the lot of them have something we might call a 'common understanding'. To realize this 'common understanding', the owner of (the knowledge that contains) the semantic units must actively (consciously) understand and distinguish between each of them, specify names (terms) that represent them, and create and maintain curated texts, definitions and perhaps other stuff.

Criteria

A Semantic unit is something that can be thought of as a basic building block of meaning or representation that exists within the 'mind' of a party (i.e., in its knowledge). Typically, parties have (at least) one term that they use to refer to that semantic unit.