semantic unification

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{{about|semantic unification in business processes|the concept in formal logic|Unification (computer science)}}

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Semantic unification is the process of unifying lexically different concept representations that are judged to have the same semantic content (i.e., meaning). In business processes, the conceptual semantic unification is defined as "the mapping of two expressions onto an expression in an exchange format which is equivalent to the given expression".Fawsy Bendeck,[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/953384/ Automation of XML Documents Translators Generation]. In 10th IEEE, International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), June 2001

Semantic unification has since been applied to the fields of business processes and workflow management. In the early 1990s Charles Petri{{full|date=May 2021}} at Stanford University{{full|date=May 2021}} introduced the term "semantic unification" for business models, later references could be found inYuji Matsumoto, Hozumi Tanaka, Hideki Hirakawa, Hideo Miyoshi, and Hideki Yasukawa, [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yuji_Matsumoto2/publication/225168476_BUP_A_Bottom-Up_parser_embedded_in_Prolog/links/54d5e2d80cf24647580870ee/BUP-A-Bottom-Up-parser-embedded-in-Prolog.pdf BUP: a bottom-up parser embedded in Prolog]. New Generation Computing, 1(2):145-158, 1983. and later formalized in Fawsy Bendeck's dissertation.Fawsy Bendeck, [http://www.uni-trier.de/index.php?id=20230 WSM-P Workflow Semantic Matching Platform], PhD dissertatation, Business Computer Information System, University of Trier, Germany, 2008. Petri introduced the term 'pragmatic semantic unification" to refer to the approaches in which the results are tested against a running application using the semantic mappings.{{Cite journal| year = 2005 | doi = 10.1109/MIC.2005.107| pages = 96–97| volume = 9| journal = IEEE Internet Computing| title = Pragmatic Semantic Unification| last1 = Petrie | first1 = C.| issue = 5 }} In this pragmatic approach, the accuracy of the mapping is not as important as its usability.

In general, semantic unification as used in business processes is employed to find a common unified concept that matches two lexicalized expressions into the same interpretation.{{CN|date=May 2021}}