Changes in network of biochemical and biological technical terms and semantic relationships

Abstract

Conceptual network in the field of Molecular Biology of Cell was usedto analyze how the conceptual network evolves. Conceptual network isgenerated by extraction of terms and by linking terms according tosemantic relationships among terms. Such network represents knowledgeof Molecular Biology of Cell, where a node represents a concept and alink indicates two concepts are semantically related. Three stageswere selected, where the number of concepts are 9,727, 10,983, and 14,373. Analysis based on the number of links per node suggests that the conceptual network evolves nonrandomly. Furthermore, analysis suggest that a new concept is introduced to the conceptual network with single relationship, and progressively conncects to a group of concepts with 15-20 relationships. This number is the threshold of clustering hierarchy. Concepts jumping this threshold seem to become important and/or general concepts.