Terminologierelaties

Terminologierelaties are the semantic and lexical connections between terms within a terminology system and between the concepts those terms denote. They organize knowledge to support consistent indexing, search, translation, and interoperability across languages and domains.

The main types of relations include hierarchical, equivalence, and associative links. Hierarchical relations connect terms in a parent–child structure, such as broader term and narrower term, which helps users navigate from general concepts to specific ones. Equivalence relations capture lexical variants and synonyms, where different terms refer to the same concept, or where a preferred term is designated for indexing and retrieval. Associative relations link terms that are related conceptually but not in a hierarchical way, such as cause-effect, instrument-use, or related phenomena, enabling cross-linking of related ideas.

In addition to these, meronymic and holonymic relations describe part–whole connections, while cross-domain relations connect concepts across different subject areas. Lexical management within terminologies often distinguishes preferred terms from non-preferred terms, with synonyms, variant spellings, and multilingual labels captured to support multilingual access and translation.

Modeling and standards play a key role. SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is widely used to encode relations such as skos:broader, skos:narrower, and skos:related, along with preferred labels and alternative labels. ISO standards on terminology work, such as ISO 704 and ISO 1087, provide guidance on the development and maintenance of term relations.

Applications of terminologierelaties include information retrieval, indexing, translation, metadata interoperability, and knowledge organization in digital libraries, glossaries, and ontologies. Properly defined relations improve precision, recall, and cross-language consistency.