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. 2022 May 11;5:883341. doi: 10.3389/fdata.2022.883341

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Copyright © 2022 Schultes, Roos, Bonino da Silva Santos, Guizzardi, Bouwman, Hankemeier, Baak and Mons.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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People think in “concepts” as in: “unique units of thought” and how they are meaningfully connected (Mons and Velterop, 2009). That unit of thought can refer to either a physical object in reality, or an “intellectual concept,” an abstraction, or a “mental construct” such as “cancer” (also a “type”) vs. a physical instance of a tumor, or an abstract concept without a physical twin. Humans use a multitude of symbols, words, tokens, and identifiers to “refer to” the concept they have in mind. This ambiguity in human language (and pointedly also in classical scientific narrative) is a source of confusion because of synonyms, homonyms, (mis)translation into other languages, and semantic as well as conceptual drift. All of these will be rather superficially addressed in FDT context later.