Concept

What is a Concept

Assigning concepts or labels plays a pivotal role in simplifying the comprehension of incoming data. When an individual perceives a real-world object, such as an apple, photons striking the retina initiate a cognitive process that assigns a categorical label, “apple”, to that object. This process essentially hinges on the assignment of a concept, which can be thought of as a mental label or tag.

Concepts within our system are systematically cataloged and identified through unique Concept Identifiers (CIDs).

Concept Identifiers

CID is a unique identifier to the concept. While it is advisable to assign human-readable names to concepts for practicality, it’s essential to acknowledge that CIDs themselves lack inherent semantic meaning. This characteristic affords us the flexibility to allocate arbitrary IDs to concepts without disrupting system integrity.

CIDs for atomic concepts are constrained to alphanumeric characters.

For compound concepts (section about them can be found below), the CID is defined as follows:

Name{field1=CID1,field2=CID2, ...}

The fields are sorted alphabetically, with the “Name” component adhering to the naming conventions applied to atomic CIDs. Compound concepts must list all their fields. If field is not populated, use default concept for this field. If a field is used to add hierarchical relation to the concept, use &= instead of an equal sign.

Examples of CIDs:

• Apple
• Color
• EntityWithDescription{description=EntityDescription,entity&=Entity}
• EntityWithDescription{description=ColorRed,entity&=Apple}
• EntityWithDescription{description=RedColor,entity&=EntityWithDescription{description=BigSize,entity&=Apple}}

Hierarchical Relations of Concepts

In our conceptual framework, both atomic and compound concepts exhibit hierarchical relationships. Atomic concepts often form the foundational elements of these hierarchies, while compound concepts, with their combination of fields, enable the expression of more intricate relationships. For example concept Lion is a child of Animal and Animal is a child of Concept, which also makes Lion a child of Concept (the relation is transitive). Compound concepts can have regular parents and parents defined via fields. Hierarchical relations are stored in Conceptual Knowledge Base.

Compound Concepts

Diverging from atomic concepts, which are relatively straightforward labels like Apple, compound concepts exhibit a more abstract nature. A compound concept only materializes into a concrete concept when all its constituent fields are populated with specific data. To illustrate, let’s examine the concept of a red apple:

EntityWithDescription {
    entity=Apple,
    description=RedColor
}

For simplicity we don’t follow CID convention in this examples This compound concept, much like the Animal concept, is abstract. However, unlike Animal, the meaning of this concept is shaped by providing field values, in this case, entity and description. Without the compound concepts, our knowledge base would include numerous atomic concepts like RedApple, BlackCar, YellowCar, and so forth. By leveraging compound concepts we can describe arbitrary combinations of concepts.

Defaults for fields

By default compound concepts must define default subconcepts for all fields, for example:

EntityWithDescription {
    entity=Entity,
    description=EntityDescription
}

Usually defaults will be abstract atomic concepts.

Recursion

Compound concepts can have other compound concepts as their fields:

EntityWithDescription {
    entity=EntityWithDescription {
        entity=Apple,
        description=BigSize
    },
    description=RedColor
}

This concept describes an idea of a big red apple. Compound concepts can have arbitrary number of fields.

Compound Concepts are not parents

It is possible to use compound concepts to define hierarchical relations, for example Animal{type=Lion}, but hierarchical relations must not be defined this way, use knowledge graph for this.

Transitive Fields

Fields of compound objects can be transitive, which mean that they transit hierarchical information. For example the concept

EntityWithDescription {
	entity=Apple,
	description=BigSize
}

is an extended concept of Apple, which means that everything that applies to Apple, also applies to the compound concept. But this is only true for the field entity, field description does not have this property in this compound concept. It wouldn’t make sense to make the description field transitive because EntityWithDescription is not a Description, it’s an extension of Entity.