ideaspreserving

ideaspreserving is a term used in information design and knowledge management to denote the practice of maintaining the central ideas, arguments, and logical structure of a source when it is transformed, communicated, or reused. It emphasizes fidelity of meaning and relationships over superficial wording. The phrase is a compound of idea and preserving; it is not widely standardized and is used mainly in applied contexts such as education, journalism, and AI-assisted content processing.

Applications include summarization, translation, paraphrase, curriculum development, archival metadata creation, and interface information architecture. In AI, ideaspreserving describes efforts to retain semantic content while compressing or rewriting text, code, or media.

Methods commonly entail identifying core propositions, causal links, and hierarchies; constructing a representation such as a concept map or knowledge graph; applying iterative human-in-the-loop evaluation to verify fidelity; and choosing representation levels appropriate to the audience.

Evaluation often uses fidelity-based metrics, semantic similarity with reference texts, and human judgments of idea preservation. Challenges include subjective interpretation, domain specificity, and balancing conciseness with completeness.

Related concepts include information fidelity, faithful paraphrase, and semantic preservation. It overlaps with extractive and abstractive summarization and with translation studies.

Because idea is often ill-defined, complete preservation may be impossible; trade-offs are common, and scope should be defined carefully. Ideaspreserving is typically pursued as a goal in content transformation projects and as a criterion for evaluating summarization and translation quality.