a graph used to capture conceptual relationships. Created by the artificial intelligence research community, it was originally used in programs designed to understand natural (human) language. Nodes in the network represented entities and their properties in a domain. The arc link reflected the semantic nature of the property. This system has been used to model human information storage (particularly the means by which words are connected to meanings and associations in long-term memory), with latencies in retrieval times supposedly reflecting the length of the path of the network searched for the required response.