Seostus

Seostus is a term used in information science, education, and cognitive science to describe the process of creating and navigating associative links between concepts within a knowledge network. It emphasizes establishing connections that reflect relationships such as similarity, causality, sequence, or functional dependency, rather than treating topics as isolated items.

The word seostus is of Finnish origin, derived from seos or similar root meaning mixture or relation, with the noun-forming suffix -us to denote a process or state. In practice, seostus refers to both the act of forming such links and the resulting web of associations.

Practitioners implement seostus through methods such as concept mapping, tagging and folksonomies, thesauri, and network graphs. In education, seostus helps learners build mental models by linking ideas to related concepts, examples, and prerequisites. In information architecture, it guides navigation structures and search facets by promoting relatedness rather than isolated topics.

Because associations can be explicit or implicit, seostus relies on user input and contextual metadata. It can improve recall and discovery but risks over-linking or bias toward commonly connected items if not managed with clear guidelines and governance.

Related concepts include concept maps, ontologies, semantic networks, taxonomies, and metadata.