Wikipedia

http://www.wikipedia.org/

This Wiki Website absolutely must be included in this document as a close example of the information structure being discussed here. With a brief viewing (soon to be expanded greatly) the Wikipedia appears to be aiming at a multilingual encyclopedia with interlinked definitions. Each definition may refer to other definitions in the existing encyclopedia.
It could be considered as a single database version of a conceptionary, without any hierarchy of concepts.

The interesting initial discovery is that these links between definitions are also categorised, with many different 'themes' for the categorisation. The complexity of this linkage illustrates that which has been discussed above in sections 1.2 and 1.7, in that the flexibility of the links may disguise the true nature of the concept, and its part of the major concept to which it belongs. For example, our 'Fusion Reactor' may be linked to 'Kettle' by the common concept of 'Bubbling Water', which is interesting, but not as much as 'Energy Capture from Unstable Nuclear Materials'.

The Wiki format of this encyclopedia also allows the definitions to be edited by the reader, hopefully to enhance the definition for future readers. The constant revision of the same definition could lead to an incoherent text that has conflicting information and even debate, whereas a term or concept with multiple definitions from different contributors would allow the enhancements to remain 'autonomous' and for the reader to consider in context of the other definitions supplied.

Further to this, a voting system for agreement with each definition may provide a filtering system for definitions based upon the 'level of agreement' with each supplied definition. This voting system could be open to all readers, or restricting to an 'authority group' depending on the level of specialisation/complexity of the discussed concept.