Jarg - Glossary

Glossary

This is a short selection of terms in knowledge management, semantic computing and ontology-building which may be helpful to the general reader.

Context	A generalization about a piece of information, which refers to it belonging to a coherent body of concepts represented by a consistent professional language. A context is described and stored as the ontology of a particular subject area.
Controlled Vocabulary	A set of terms or concepts, also called a Lexicon or Thesaurus. One can think of the terms in the Vocabulary either as lexical terms, and hence the keywords of the ontology, or on higher semantic level as concepts (each of which can be expressed in many ways, by words or phrases). While a lexical term is often a word or phrase, it can also be a person, a number, or a range of names or numbers.
DAML	DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML). This research program is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The goal of the DAML Program is to develop a language and tools to facilitate the realization of the Semantic Web. Some of this work evolved into the OWL knowledge representation language.
Join	Noun or Verb; The act of joining two or more tables in a relational database in order to perform an exact query; example: Find all customers named "Smith" where Sales Representative is "George". The table of Sales Representatives is joined to the table of Customers by a relation "sells to". A query with multiple joins can be slow to process, and table design must be anticipated in advance, which makes relational implementations inflexible and unsuitable for knowledge assembly applications.
KeyNet™	A term coined by Jarg for a fragment of a knowledge representation which is used to retrieve knowledge. "Key" implies retrieval and "Net" implies semantic network. A KeyNet can be shown graphically as named concepts and relationships (a.k.a. "Edges") in diagram form. Link here for a description of KeyNets by Jarg founder, Prof. Baclawski.
Metadata	Information about the information in a database.
NIH	National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the US Dept. Of Health and Human Services, is the steward of medical and behavioral research for the USA.
NLM	National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the US government's National Institutes of Health, is the world's largest medical library.
NLP	Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a set of computing techniques that analyze text as "natural" complete sentences, rather than, for example, as individual keywords. The process refers to analyzing sentence structure (syntax) rather than meaning (semantics).
NSF	National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the U.S. Government, founded to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense.
Ontology	In the context of computing, we describe ontology as a database of concepts describing a body of knowledge, with structure defined by standard relationships between terms. Like a Lexicon or Thesaurus it describes concepts, but in addition, has a structure of relationships between concepts. See also Context. Originally meaning a philosophy of knowledge.
OWL	The OWL Web Ontology Language, developed within W3C, is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. See web link here
RDF	Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a computing specification and infrastructure that enables the encoding, exchange and reuse of structured metadata, so that the meaning of data may be shared among disparate information communities. See web link here.
Semantic	Adjective; describing the meaning of terms. Noun; Semantics
Semantic Web	The Semantic Web provides a common computing framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming. See web link here
SKIP™	Semantic Knowledge Indexing Platform™ (SKIP), the ontology-based knowledge indexing, integration, and assembly platform marketed by Jarg Corporation, and by its division, Semantx Life Sciences.
Syntax	The structure of a sentence. See NLP.
UMLS	Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). A set of multi-purpose, electronic "Knowledge Sources" and associated lexical programs for medicine, developed by the NIH. It is a large and complex example of a set of ontologies, developed to assist in medical research and health care. See web link here.