How to represent concepts as data

When you identify different concepts (e.g. within a semantic network) you need a way of representing them as data. The simplest approach is to use a natural language term to describe a concept. The problem with this is, that there are multiple ways to describe the same concept with different words. And the same word can have different meanings.

One approach is to ignore this circumstance and handle each concept within the database by using one natural language term: [[one-natural-language-term-for-each-concept-approach]]

An other approach is not to handle individual concepts but groups of concepts that can be only described by a subset of all the natural language terms within the database.