Semantic networks

A semantic network, or frame network, is a network that represents semantic relations between concepts. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges, which represent semantic relations between concepts.

Typical standardized semantic networks are expressed as semantic triples.

"Semantic Nets" were first invented for computers by Richard H. Richens of the Cambridge Language Research Unit in 1956 as an "interlingua" for machine translation of natural languages.

They were independently developed by Robert F. Simmons, Sheldon Klein, Karen McConologue, M. Ross Quillian and others at System Development Corporation in the early 1960s as part of the SYNTHEX project. It later featured prominently in the work of Allan M. Collins and Quillian (e.g., Collins and Quillian; Collins and Loftus Quillian)

In the late 1980s, two Netherlands universities, Groningen and Twente, jointly began a project called Knowledge Graphs, which are semantic networks but with the added constraint that edges are restricted to be from a limited set of possible relations, to facilitate algebras on the graph. In the subsequent decades, the distinction between semantic networks and knowledge graphs was blurred. In 2012, Google gave their knowledge graph the name Knowledge Graph.

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