Semantic network

A semantic network is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It consists of vertices which represent concepts and edges which represent semantic relations between the concepts. A semantic net is a directed graph.

Semantic networks are a common type of machine-readable dictionaries.

Important semantic relations:

• Meronymy (A is part of B)
• Holonymy (B has A as a part of itself)

• Hyponymy (or Troponymy) (A is subordinate of B; A is kind of B)
• Hyperonymy (A is superordinate of B)

• Synonymy (A denotes the same as B)
• Antonymy (A denotes the opposite of B)

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:

• article A is linked to by article B
• the name of article A is used in the Wikipedia entry for B

See also:

• Semantic Web and this
• Information space

External links:

• WordNet home page
• [1] "Computing Science - The Web of Words"