referentsnames

Referentsnames is a term encountered in discussions of semantics, linguistics, and knowledge representation that refers to the labels or identifiers attached to referents—the objects or entities to which expressions point in a given context. A referent is the real-world thing or concept that a word, phrase, or symbol stands for; the referent name is the label used to reference that thing in discourse, data stores, or user interfaces.

In linguistic analysis, referent names help map discourse to the actual referents being discussed, clarifying who or what is being referred to when pronouns or definite descriptions are used. In computational contexts, referent names serve as human-readable labels for nodes in ontologies, knowledge graphs, databases, and annotation schemas, intended to be stable, interpretable, and sortable.

Examples: the referent for "the capital of France" is the city of Paris; its referent name could be "Paris" or "Paris, France" in a dataset. In multilingual systems, referent names may include multiple language variants or transliterations.

Challenges include ambiguity from homonyms, polysemy, and name changes, as well as versioning and aliasing where one referent has multiple names or one name applies to multiple referents. Effective use requires disambiguation methods, clear naming conventions, and, where possible, ties to immutable identifiers in addition to human-readable names.

Referentsnames is not a formally defined term in core linguistic or database standards, but it appears as a useful label in documentation and discussions about how names track the entities they denote and how this linkage supports retrieval, interpretation, and cross-language interoperability.