In language, semantics describe the names and meanings of words. The bioinformatics community has aptly adopted biosemantics as a concept that encompasses the issues with the names and meanings of biological entities, usually in natural language processing and data integration. However, semantics does not capture the context of words, and biosemantics fails to describe the biological context and complex relationships between biological entities.

Semantics versus Pragmatics

Pragmatics goes beyond semantics and describes the context of words. Because of this parallelism, I’ve begun to use the term biopragmatics to describe the family of computational approaches aimed at identifying and contextualizing the context of biological entities.