Emergence and disappearance of concepts in network of biochemical and biological technical terms

Abstract

Conceptual network in the field of Molecular Biology of Cell was used to analyze how the conceptual network evolves. Conceptual network is generated by extraction of terms and by linking terms according to semantic relationships among terms. Such network represents knowledge of Molecular Biology of Cell, where a node represents a concept and a link indicates two concepts are semantically related. Years of 1989, 1994 and 2001 were selected to analyze the structural change in the conceptual network. Only the hierarchical relationship was used for the analysis. The depth is six for all three instances, and the number of concepts increases for every hierarchical level. However, proportion of concepts belonging to both consecutive years is small than expected, and the number of concepts belonging to the previous year is very high. The analysis suggests that concepts become more general and thus less used with the advance in the field, climbing the hierarchical "mountain" and ultimately disappearing from the conceptual network.