A semantic network is a knowledge-representation structure that models concepts as nodes and their relationships as labelled edges. It captures meaning through typed links such as is-a and part-of, supporting inference, inheritance, and associative retrieval. It is a long-standing formalism underlying ontologies, knowledge graphs, and cognitive models of memory.
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- By encoding inheritance and associative links, semantic networks enable inference such as property propagation and spreading activation. They are the conceptual ancestor of modern knowledge graphs and description-logic ontologies, balancing expressiveness against tractable reasoning.