Semantic unification, in philosophy, linguistics, and computer science, is the process of unifying lexically different concept representations that are judged to have the same semantic content (i.e., meaning). Semantic unification has a long history in fields like philosophy and linguistics. In computer science it has been used in different research areas like grammar unification, and Prolog extensions .
Semantic unification has since been applied to the fields of business processes and workflow management. In the earliest 90’s Charles Petri introduced the term of semantic unification for business models, later references could be found in and later formalized in Fawsy Bendeck's PhD thesis . Petri introduced the term “Pragmatic Semantic Unification” to refer to the approaches in which the results are tested against a running application using the semantic mappings. In this pragmatic approach, the accuracy of the mapping is not as important as its usability.
Famous quotes containing the word semantic:
“Watt’s need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)