Articulate a term

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Video Tutorial

While you are building a pattern, you create lexons. A lexon consist of two terms with a connecting relation (role and corole). Each term exists within a certain context, usually the location from which this term is extracted (a document, web-page, schema, ...). This is what we call the lexical level of the pattern. However, it is important to be able to link these terms to the conceptual level as well, through concept definitions.

It is necessary to be able to link a term and its context to a concept definition identified with a certain URI. Because each concept definition is uniquely identified by a certain URI, it allows the information systems to know they are talking about the same thing. This goes back to the problem of homonyms and synomyms.  For example:

1. The term "Bank" can be understood in the context of a financial institution or in the context of an obstacle at sea. The term "Bank" is a homonym as it has different meanings depending on the context.
2. The term "Bank" can mean the same as the term "Financial Institution", which is conform with the idea of a synonym.

By letting both terms point to the same concept definition, the system as well as the users know that both terms mean the same thing.

We call the process of pointing a term to a concept definition articulating a term. By articulating a term to a concept definition, we clearly define the meaning of the term for the user as well as for the information systems through its URI. The term is articulated in the sense that a much more in-depth description can be assigned to a concept definition which unambiguously clarifies the meaning of the term in a certain context. Articulating a term to a concept definition is done in the Concept Details View. The figure below shows the Concept Details View with the term Pallet selected in the Visual Editor.

The process of articulating a term goes like this:

1. Click on the blue 'i' in the upper right corner of the Concept Details View.
2. A dialog will pop up to edit the concept definition.
3. Enter a gloss description and URI. (A best-practice here is to point the URI to an actual URL.
4. Click Finish to make the changes.