Semiotic triangle

Symbol, concept, referent — elementary use of symbols for concepts

Symbol, concept, referent

The semiotic triangle relates three corners: the symbol (word, sign, icon), the concept in the mind or specification, and the referent in the world. Ontology engineering must disambiguate when the same string (e.g. “Picasso”) denotes a person, a painting, or the word itself—mirroring long-standing semiotics from Peirce and Saussure through to applied naming in [ArSm2015] and [GuBe2021].

Correct naming and symbol choice are prerequisites for stable identifiers, labels, and URIs; they feed directly into Ontological concepts and OntoGraph notation.

Picasso example (PDF)

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References

  1. [ArSm2015] Robert Arp, Barry Smith, Andrew D. Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, The MIT Press, London, England , 2015, ISBN: 978-0-262-52781-1
  2. [GuBe2021] Giancarlo Guizzardi, Alessander Botti Benevides, Claudenir M. Fonseca, Daniele Porello, João Paulo A. Almeida, Tiago Prince Sales, UFO: Unified Foundational Ontology, Applied Ontology 1-3 , 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355735118_UFO_Unified_Foundational_Ontology, last visit: 09.04.2026