Chapter 3

Conceptual relations

This chapter gives an overview of concept relations. They can be used to create terminological products, guarantee their quality and make their contents more accessible to the users. They facilitate the analysis, organization, and definition of concepts, and help to establish connections between concepts and terms, to form and evaluate terms, and to identify term equivalents. This chapter first relates conceptual relations to concept formation, and discusses relevant aspects of terminological resources. Then an extensive typology of conceptual relations is compared to typologies with multidisciplinary backgrounds and purposes. Terminology work and terminological resources often use only basic relation types. However, ontologies, automatic term extraction, and advanced terminological knowledge systems benefit from a larger set of relation types.