Semantomics

The field of Semantomics was founded by Stephen J. Moorman on April 29, 2003 at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffet Field in California.  Members of the field of semantomics are burdened with the responsibility of giving legitimacy to new words, with particular focus on scientific disciplines.

The life sciences have witnessed an exponential increase in information during this new genomic era.  This has spawned a coincident increase in terminology.  In an effort to increase awareness/funding for what had previously been perceived as mundane endeavors, scientists began to invent new terms to refer to their particular fields of research.  For instance, proteomics and metabalomics.  The co-opting of the suffix ‘omic’ from the term genomic was thought to imply greater relevance.  However, ‘anatomic’ predates genomic as a research specialty.  Since anatomists are renowned for their discussions of terminology, I thought the creation of the field of “semantomics” was timely.

Semantomics is now defined as the formalization of our knowledge of the semantome in ways that are readily comprehensible to computer-based resources.  Semantome is the term used to represent the complete set of words used in the english languages.

If you have a word that you would like incorporated into the semantome, send an e-mail.