When you browse the EM Glossary you will notice that each term consists of structured data in the form of key-value pairs. Most of the keys can be understood intuitively. However they do have a specific technical purpose. The keys that we use were chosen as they can be well represented (either as class hierarchy or as annotation properties) in the web ontology language (OWL). This is necessary for the technical implementation of the glossary. You can find examples of the glossary implementation on our adopters page.
Here we provide additional information on how we understand and use the different keys for further disambiguation.
The human-readable, most commonly used name for the term. In the EM Glossary OWL implementation this is used to name each class.
This phrase describes the meaning behind the Label. It is designed for human understanding. For clarity and brevity our definitions follow two principles:
We use the Aristotelian Genus-Differentia form for writing definitions. As such our definitions start with a genus, A, followed by a list of differentia B1, B2... Bn. Differentia are features which differentiate this particular term from other terms of the same genus. This results in a definition in the form: term is an A which B1, B2... Bn. In our OWL implementation the genus gets mapped to the class hierarchy, and a subclass in the hierarchy inherits all properties from its superclass.
We unpack definitions. Where definitions require subject-specific technical terms, we use them, but ensure that they are defined elsewhere in the glossary as well. The result is a strict one-term-per-definition policy. While browsing the glossary you will find and quick-links to these related terms and their definitions, as well as an entry under the Internal Reference key.
A list which identifies the persons that contributed to discussions and drafting of the content associated with each term. The links in the term resolve to ORCID which are persistent identifiers for people. More information on our contributors can be found in the contributors page.
Stands for Internationalized Resource Identifier - a persistent, unique way of identifying the web location where a term's information is stored. It is important for the machine readability of the OWL implementation of the EM Glossary. The link will forward you to the documentation page of the EM Glossary OWL artefact.
A physical phenomenon during which the direction and intensity of a propagating wave is changed due to interaction with matter having structure dimensions in the order of the wavelength.
The term "matter" used in this definition is meant to represent crystalline as well as amorphous matter (e.g. gases or objects). Diffraction might be regarded as a specific type of elastic scattering. Diffracted waves are coherent and can interfere, forming diffraction patterns.The terms scattering and diffraction are used to describe the same phenomenon from different perspectives. From the view of a particle, people tend to speak of scattering, while from the view of waves and the related patterns, people speak of diffraction.Due to the wave-particle dualism, a beam of sub-atomic particles (e.g. electrons) can be diffracted.
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