A concept is an idea that requires substantive exposition. Where a term fixes a name to a meaning, a concept develops an idea: what it involves, how it relates to other things, what problems it addresses, what it explains.
The distinction between a term and a concept is one of scope, not kind. Both are things — stable relational configurations. But a term is a naming relation (this word means this), while a concept is a relational structure complex enough that naming alone does not convey it. “Hyperbolic odor space” is a concept: understanding it requires knowing about dimensionality, olfactory coding, and distance metrics in neural representation. The name does not carry the idea; the exposition does.
In knowledge organization systems, concepts correspond to what SKOS
calls skos:Concept — units of thought that can be labeled, defined,
related to other concepts, and organized into schemes. The ASR’s
concept files serve the same role: they are the units from which
understanding is composed.
Concepts belong to disciplines and topics. A concept file sits in the
concepts/ directory of the discipline or topic it belongs to. When a
concept is foundational enough to be shared across disciplines, it
belongs in the most general discipline where it makes sense — not
duplicated across multiple directories.
Related terms
- term — a word with a stipulated definition; narrower than a concept
- topic — an area of inquiry; broader than a concept
- discipline — a structured domain of knowledge that contains concepts