A glossary, also known as an idioticon, vocabulary, or clavis, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definition

Definition

A definition is a passage that explains the meaning of a term , or a type of thing. The term to be defined is the definiendum. A term may have many different senses or meanings...

s for those terms. Traditionally, a glossary appears at the end of a book

Book

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...

 and includes terms within that book which are either newly introduced, uncommon or specialized.

A bilingual glossary is a list of terms in one language which are defined in a second language or glossed by synonym

Synonym

Synonyms are different words with almost identical or similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. The word comes from Ancient Greek syn and onoma . The words car and automobile are synonyms...

s (or at least near-synonyms) in another language.

In a general sense, a glossary contains explanations of concept

Concept

The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...

s relevant to a certain field of study or action. In this sense, the term is related to the notion of ontology

Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

. Automatic methods have been also provided that transform a glossary into an ontology or a computational lexicon.

Core glossary

A core glossary is a simple glossary or defining dictionary which enables definition of other concepts, especially for newcomers to a language or field of study. It contains a small working vocabulary and definitions for important or frequently encountered concepts, usually including idioms or metaphors useful in a culture.
In computer science, a core glossary is a prerequisite to a core ontology

Core ontology

In philosophy, a core ontology is a basic and minimal ontology consisting only of the minimal concepts required to understand the other concepts. It must be based on a core glossary in some human language so humans can comprehend the concepts and distinctions made...

. An example of this is seen in SUMO

Suggested Upper Merged Ontology

The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems. It was originally developed by the Teknowledge Corporation and now is maintained by . It is one candidate for the "standard upper ontology"...

.

Searching glossaries on the web

The search engine

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

 Google provided a service to only search web pages belonging to a glossary therefore providing access to a kind of compound glossary of glossary entries found on the web.

Automatic extraction of glossaries

Computational approaches

Algorithm

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...

 to the automated extraction of glossaries from corpora or the Web have been developed in the recent years. These methods typically start from domain terminology

Terminology

Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and compound words that in specific contexts are given specific meanings, meanings that may deviate from the meaning the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language. The discipline Terminology studies among other...

 and extract one or more glosses for each term of interest. Glosses can then be analyzed to extract hypernym

Hypernym

In linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within that of another word, its hypernym . In simpler terms, a hyponym shares a type-of relationship with its hypernym...

s of the defined term and other lexical and semantic relations.

External links

• Introduction to GlossML This article presents Glossary Markup Language (GlossML), an open XML vocabulary specially designed to facilitate the exchange of glossaries.
• The Glossarist - Large list of glossaries
• The TAO of Topic Maps
• Babel Linguistics Glossaries Selected Multilingual Glossaries by Industry