Synonymy that is “Web-Scale”

• Concepts (classes of terms) finely granular

• “Fully expressive” names

  • Acronyms
  • Gene Names
  • “special meanings”

• Scalable methodologies, large scale vocabularies

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So I go home and scratch my head

What does it mean:

Came up with three ideas

1. Concepts must be finely granular... Don’t want everything about “health”, or

even “health effects of food supplements” ... need “health effects of ginseng tea”

2. Names are a problem

Acronyms -- ACP is American College of Physicians

also Associated Collegiate Press

also American Center for Physics

Names of Genes are a special problem in this regard - this is a big problem looming in biomedicine

Certain groups have special meanings to key phrases -

Zipf’s law says you shorten the words and phrases you use all the time

Thus “abortion” is used traditionally by physicians to mean a miscarriage,

but now it is used to mean a procedure...

3. If you are going to build something web-scale, must use a scalable methodology and produce a large scale vocabulary.