graphs.sgit.ai → Glossary
Glossary
Every term gets a plain-English alternative next to the technical one. Not underneath it, and not as a simplification for beginners: the plain phrase is usually the better one to use.
“a lot of the people that will use this don't know about semantic graphs, don't know about ontologies, don't know about a lot of the other terms, so we also need to explore different UIs, and different ways to name this.” — 9 August 2026. The document's own gloss: this makes naming a design problem rather than a documentation one.
Written fresh, and asked for by name. The corpus contains exactly one terminology table, buried inside a brief about translation. This chapter starts there and expands it; its absence was gap G4 in the brief pack's catalogue of twelve gaps. If a definition here is wrong or a term is missing, tell the comms board: this chapter is expected to change more than any other.
Words about meaning
| Term | Say this instead | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Concept | an idea | The unit of meaning, independent of any language. Carries one preferred label per language plus alternates. This is the thing you are actually modelling. |
| Term | a word for it | How one language happens to express a concept. Two terms can point at one concept; one term can point at several. |
| Taxonomy | a filing tree | A hierarchy: broader and narrower, one parent. Answers “where does this go?”. Points upward. |
| Ontology | the kinds of thing, and how they connect | What types exist, what relationships are allowed between them, and what constraints hold. Points outward, which is the difference from a taxonomy. |
| Semantic field | a neighbourhood of related ideas | The set of concepts that cluster around one, in a given language or domain. Where two languages' fields diverge, that divergence is a finding. |
| Concept scheme | a published vocabulary | A named, versioned set of concepts somebody maintains: EuroVoc, schema.org, Wikidata. Useful as an anchor, not as an authority. |
| Semantic graph | a graph where the edges carry the meaning | A graph built so that what a node is can be derived from its connections rather than read off its label. |
Words about structure
| Term | Say this instead | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Node | a thing | Anything you want to say something about. On its own it means nothing; that is the first idea in this book. |
| Edge | a stated relationship | Always a verb, always directed, always with a distinct inverse. The rule. |
| Inverse | the other way round, said properly | Not the same edge walked backwards: a different relationship with a different name and different fan-out. Why that matters. |
| Path | a sentence | A sequence of edges. If it does not read as a sentence in the reader's own words, the edges are wrong. |
| Anchor node | a shared landmark | A well-known reference point that several parties link to. Has no authority: you point at it, you do not become it. |
| Node type formula | a rule that decides what something is | A required pattern of paths a node either matches or does not. Replaces “somebody labelled it that” with a computation. Longer version. |
| Fractal | same rules at every zoom level | A precise claim, not a decoration: self-similarity, scale invariance, composition, recursion, and no new format and no special case when you zoom in. How to falsify it. |
| Projection | a view, generated when needed | A document, a skill file or a standard rendered from the graph rather than stored. Longer version. |
| The blob | the hairball | The graph rendered all at once, showing nothing. A rendering failure, not a modelling one; fix it at query time. |
| The flip | re-ask the question from what you found | Go wide, find the few relevant nodes, then re-root the query at those and walk out again. |
Words about reality and confidence
| Term | Say this instead | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Twin | the real system this stands for | Where the graph stops modelling and continues into something real. Whether an endpoint actually reaches reality is itself a measurable fact. |
| Air gap | the place it does not reach, named | A tracked, owned gap where no connection to the real system exists. A named absence beats a hidden one. |
| Fact | something with evidence under it | A node with a downward path to evidence. Without that path it is an assertion, which is a different kind of thing. |
| Vulnerability | a fact that leads somewhere bad | A fact that also has an upward path to a risk. The same fact is not a vulnerability until somebody connects it. |
| Grounding | is it real? | Walking downward, fact to evidence to measure, asking for something more checkable at each step. |
| Blast radius | what else this touches | Everything reachable from a thing once it goes wrong. A closure, not a list. |
| Authorization closure | everything it can actually reach | The transitive union of every permission reachable through other permissions. Called the agentic union; for an agent it is the rating floor, not the nominal grant. |
| Supersede | marked out of date, not deleted | Because the point is to be able to ask what was resting on it. The 10,000-hours case. |
| Enrichment, not enforcement | add edges, don't add rules | The remedy for low confidence is more connections, never more validation. The graph grows; it does not constrain. |
| Decompilation | lifting text back into structure | Going from concrete text to abstract meaning. Ambiguous by nature, so the author is the only oracle, and “that is not what I meant” is the process working. |
Words this book does not use
| Not this | Because |
|---|---|
| “knowledge graph” | Fine as a phrase, but it usually implies a store and a scale. The claim here is about a grammar at a boundary. Used sparingly, never as a product category. |
| a generic association edge | Banned outright. Everything relates to everything, so it constrains nothing and costs fan-out. The rule. |
| “graph database” | There isn't one. Said plainly in its own chapter. |
| “single source of truth” | The whole design assumes several parties hold incompatible truths and connects them anyway. Merging them erases the disagreement, which is usually the finding. |
For an agent
Two distinctions this vocabulary turns on. Concept vs term: the concept is the unit of meaning and is language-independent; the term is one language's label for it. Never store meaning in a term. Taxonomy vs ontology: a taxonomy points upward (broader/narrower); an ontology points outward (what types exist and how they may connect). When writing for a non-specialist audience, prefer the plain-English column: “the kinds of thing, and how they connect” lands where “ontology” does not.