terminfos

Terminfos is a term used in information science and lexicography to describe structured metadata attached to individual terms within a terminological resource. The concept emphasizes information about terms themselves rather than the documents that use them, and it is often discussed in the context of terminology management, dictionaries, and knowledge bases.

A typical terminfos record includes fields such as the term text, language, part of speech, definition, usage notes, domain or field, etymology, synonyms, antonyms, translations, and cross-references to related terms. It may also encompass provenance data, confidence levels, source references, and licensing information. The exact set of fields can vary by project, but the aim is to capture essential, reusable information about a term to support accurate retrieval and reuse.

Terminfos are stored in structured formats and can be organized as part of glossaries, thesauri, or controlled vocabularies. They support multilingual retrieval, semantic search, and quality control in terminology management, lexicography, and the development of knowledge graphs or multilingual dictionaries. In practice, terminfos enable consistent term usage across applications and facilitate cross-lingual mapping and automated indexing.

Interoperability depends on shared schemas and mappings to broader standards or ontologies. Because terminfos is not universally standardized, projects often define custom fields or adopt common frameworks (such as RDF or SKOS-inspired models) while implementing mappings to other metadata schemes. Related concepts include terminology, lexicography, thesauri, and knowledge graphs.