Graph Theory and Semantics

Last Weekend I spent most of my time revisiting Graph Theory which I studied first in 2001 during my MCA course and since then had forgotten quite a lot of it. At that time I did not find this topic that interesting and studied just for the sake of clearing exam. But last week I was going through some links on Wikipedia and it struck to me if I can use Graphs to show the relationships among objects in a system where the objects are attached to each other based on some sort or relation.

Going back to what John F Sowa described in one of his book Knowledge Representation about concepts and relations. In my opinion there lies the potential of using Graph Theory to list the relationships among different concepts existing in the same space.

Each Vertex of the graph could be the concepts as defined by Sowa and the Edges of graphs could be the relationships between the two concepts. The Edges can be uni-directional or bi-directional depending on what kind of relationship the two concepts share. The immediate benefit of this as I see is, it will facilitate the visualization of the system where each of the object exist in isolation.

While this is the thing that came to my mind when I had a read through the Graph Theory last week, I can see it being applicable to more areas as far as semantics is concerned. I am expecting by this weekend I will have a good amount of information as whether and how much graph theory can help in semantic space.

If you have similar thoughts would love to hear your views on this as well.

Until Next Time... :)