Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Concepts

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Concepts, Ontologies, and Knowledge Representation

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Computer Science ((BRIEFSCOMPUTER))

Abstract

A concept is an entity of consciousness. We know a concept when we encounter one “in action”, because it exceeds its stand-in descriptive label as a word, phrase or sentence. A concept might be a directly conceived or an intuited object of thought. In general, every object, issue, idea, person, process, place, etc., can generate a concept. Although concepts are an integral part of human cognition (or perhaps precisely because of this fact), their exact definition is fairly difficult. Various viewpoints and approaches to their explanation are presented in the first part of the present chapter. To be of any practical use for representing knowledge, concepts cannot appear in isolation, but must be associated with each other. Thus, in the continuation of the chapter, the most important formalisms for organizing concepts are presented along with the examples of organizations in actual applications. The main practical application of concepts is document retrieval based on the actual meaning referred to with the search phrase instead of the one based on (more or less) literal phrase matching. The last section of the chapter is dedicated to the topics related to concept-based search.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Baader F, Nutt W (2002) Basic description logics. In: Baader F et al (eds) The description logic handbook. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 47–100

    Google Scholar 

  • Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O (2001) The semantic web. Sci Am 284(5):34–43

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berners-Lee T, Fielding R, Masinter L (2005) Uniform resource identifier (URI): generic syntax, RFC 3986. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Boyer CB (1959) The history of the calculus and its conceptual development. Courier Dover Publications, New York

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Cañas AJ, Novak JD (2009) What is a concept map? http://cmap.ihmc.us/docs/conceptmap.html. Last update 28 Sep 2009. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Chen H, Houston AL, Sewell RR, Schatz BR (1998) Internet browsing and searching: user evaluation of category map and concept space techniques. J Am Soc Inform Sci 49(7):582–603

    Google Scholar 

  • Chen PP (1976) The entity-relationship model—toward a unified view of data. ACM Trans Database Syst 1(1):9–36

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ding L, Finin T, Joshi A, Pan R, Cost RS, Peng Y, Reddivari P, Doshi VC, Sachs J (2004) Swoogle: a search and metadata engine for the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on information and knowledge management, Washington, DC, Nov 2004

    Google Scholar 

  • Doms A, Schroeder M (2005) GoPubMed: exploring PubMed with the gene ontology. Nucleic Acids Res 33:783–786

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fellbaum C (ed) (1998) WordNet: an electronic lexical database. MIT Press, Cambridge

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Finin T, Ding L, Pan R, Joshi A, Kolari P, Java A, Peng Y (2005) Swoogle: searching for knowledge on the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the national conference on artificial intelligence (AAAI), Pittsburgh, 2005

    Google Scholar 

  • Frege G (1892) Über Sinn und Bedeutung. In: Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. English edition: Frege G (1980) On Sense and Reference (trans: Black M). In: Geach P, Black M (eds) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 3rd edn. Blackwell, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Gomez-Perez A, Corcho O (2002) Ontology languages for the semantic web. IEEE Intell Syst 17(1):54–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • GoPubMed® (2012) http://www.gopubmed.org. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • hakia.com (2012) http://www.hakia.com/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Halladay S, Milligan C (2004) The application of network science principles to knowledge simulation. In: Proceedings of the 37th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, Big Island, 5–8 Jan 2004

    Google Scholar 

  • Halpin T (2006) Object-role modeling (ORM/NIAM). In: Bernus P, Mertins K, Schmidt G (eds) Handbook on architectures of information systems. International handbooks on information systems. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 81–103

    Google Scholar 

  • Hogan A, Harth A, Umbrich J, Kinsella S, Polleres A, Decker S (2011) Searching and browsing linked data with SWSE: the semantic web search engine. J Web Semant 9(4):365–401

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hopfield J (1982) Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 79(8):2554–2558

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • International Atomic Energy Agency (2007) Joint thesaurus, Part I + II. ETDE/INIS joint reference series no. 1 (Rev. 2). http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/JRS1r2_web.pdf. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Jörgensen C, James A, Benitez AB, Chang SF (2001) A conceptual framework and empirical research for classifying visual descriptors. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 52(11):938–947

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kant I (1800) Logik. English edition: Kant I (1988) Logic (trans: Hartman RS, Schwarz W). Dover Publications, Mineola

    Google Scholar 

  • Khoo C, Na J-C (2006) Semantic relations in information science. Annu Rev Inform Sci Technol 40(1):157–228

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Locke J (1690) An essay concerning human understanding. Oxford University Press, New York, (1975)

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller GA (1995) WordNet: a lexical database for English. Commun ACM 38(11):39–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Navigli R (2009) Word sense disambiguation: a survey. ACM Comput Surv 41(2). doi: 10.1145/1459352.1459355

  • Novak J, Cañas A (2008) The theory of underlying concept maps and how to construct them. Technical report IHMC CmapTools 2006-01 Rev 01-2008, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

    Google Scholar 

  • Ogden CK, Richards IA (1923) The meaning of meaning. Harcourt, Brace & Co, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Object Management Group (2012) UML® resource page. http://www.uml.org/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • OWL Working Group (2009) OWL 2 web ontology language document overview. W3C recommendation 27 October 2009. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-overview/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Page L, Brin S, Motwani R, Winograd T (1999) The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the web. Technical report, Stanford InfoLab

    Google Scholar 

  • Petersen W (2007) Representation of concepts as frames. In: Skilters J, Toccafondi F, Stemberger G (eds) Complex cognition and qualitative science. The baltic international yearbook of cognition, logic and communication, vol 2. University of Latvia Press, pp 151–170

    Google Scholar 

  • Princeton University (2010) About WordNet. http://wordnet.princeton.edu. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Ravindran D, Gauch S (2004) Exploiting hierarchical relationships in conceptual search. In: Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on information and knowledge management, Washington, DC, 2004

    Google Scholar 

  • RDF Working Group (2012) RDF—semantic web standards. http://www.w3.org/RDF/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • RDF Working Group (2012) RDF vocabulary description language 1.0: RDF Schema (RDFS). http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/RDFS. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Salton G (1989) Automatic text processing: the transformation, analysis, and retrieval of information by computer. Addison-Wesley, Reading

    Google Scholar 

  • Salton G, Wong A (1975) A Vector Space model for automatic indexing. Commun ACM 18(11):613–620

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Saussure F de (1916) Cours de linguistique générale. English edition: Saussure F de (1983) Course in General Linguistics (trans: Harris R). Open Court, La Salle

    Google Scholar 

  • Schatz B (1997) Information retrieval in digital libraries: bringing search to the net. Science 275(5298):327–334

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schopenhauer A (1851) Parerga and paralipomena. English edition: Schopenhauer A (1974) Parerga and paralipomena: short philosophical essays (trans: Payne EFJ). Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Sindice—the semantic web index (2012) http://www.sindice.com/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Smith B (2004) Beyond concepts: ontology as reality representation. In: Varzi AC, Vieu L (eds) Proceedings of the international conference on formal ontology and information systems, Turin, 4–6 Nov, pp 73–84

    Google Scholar 

  • Sowa JF (1984) Conceptual structures: information processing in mind and machine. Addison-Wesley Publishing, Reading

    Google Scholar 

  • Sowa JF (2000) Ontology, metadata, and semiotics. In: Conceptual structures: logical, linguistic, and computational issues. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 1867. Springer, Berlin, pp 55–81

    Google Scholar 

  • Stock WG (2010) Concepts and semantic relations in information science. J Am Soc Inf Sci Tec 61(10):1951–1969

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Swoogle Semantic Web Search Engine (2012) http://swoogle.umbc.edu/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • SWSE—Semantic Web Search Engine (2012) http://swse.deri.org/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Voss A, Nakata K, Juhnke M (1999) Concept indexing. In: Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, Phoenix, 14–17 Nov 1999, pp 1–10

    Google Scholar 

  • W3C (2012) Extensible Markup Language (XML). http://www.w3.org/XML/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Watson Semantic Web Search (2012) http://kmi-web05.open.ac.uk/WatsonWUI/. Accessed 25 Sep 2012

  • Woods W (1997) Conceptual indexing: a better way to organize knowledge. Technical report, Sun Microsystems, Mountain View

    Google Scholar 

  • Zellweger P (2003) A knowledge-based model to database retrieval. In: Proceedings of the international conference on integration of knowledge intensive multi-agent systems, Boston, 30 Sep–4 Oct 2003, pp 747–753

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Tržaška cesta 25, Ljubljana, 1000, Slovenia

    Grega Jakus, Sanida Omerović & Sašo Tomažič

  2. School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra 73, 11000, Belgrade, Serbia

    Veljko Milutinović

Authors
  1. Grega Jakus
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Veljko Milutinović
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Sanida Omerović
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Sašo Tomažič
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Grega Jakus .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Jakus, G., Milutinović, V., Omerović, S., Tomažič, S. (2013). Concepts. In: Concepts, Ontologies, and Knowledge Representation. SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7822-5_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7822-5_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-7821-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7822-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation