Term

Term of patent in E.U. Patent System

The maximum number of years that the monopoly rights conferred by the grant of a patent may last.

Bound Term in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Bound Term in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Bound Term may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. A bound term is a compound term consisting of two or more words, sometimes representing two or more concepts, which almost always occur together and have come to be considered a single concept. Information science, for example, could be factored into science and information, but the bound term information science is the name of a discipline and to decompose it would be misleading. Proper names of multiple parts are also bound terms, e.g., United States. Birth control is a bound term whose meaning is different than its component parts, because the bound term means control or prevention of conception, as opposed to the control of birth. See also complex term; term.

Free-Text Term in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Free-Text Term in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Free-Text Term may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Often shortened to free text, free-text term usually refers to the use of uncontrolled words or terms from natural language text for indexing or searching. When one searches the actual text of a document, one is searching the free-text terms that are found in the document. The difference between free-text terms and just terms is that sometimes terms may be standardized, at least a little, with respect to format, and they may also have links with the most common synonyms or equivalent terms, even if they are not controlled to the extent of descriptors. In this paragraph, every term or phrase is a free-text term. Some of the smaller words (such as of, the, to, etc.) may be listed on a stop list of unsearchable terms — terms that cannot be searched for by themselves, but they are still free-text terms! Keyword is often used to indicate the more important free-text terms.

Term in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Term in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Term may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. A term is a word or a phrase representing a single concept or multiple concepts that are tightly bound together in the context of a particular Information Retrieval database. An index term is such a word or phrase associated with a documentary unit for the purposes of retrieval. Some concepts need more than one word to express them, for example, information science or venetian blind. Some terms could be divided into two separate terms, but they are used so commonly together in a consistent order that they are considered a single bound term or compound term. Terms subjected to vocabulary control and management are often called descriptors. Terms are combined to form index headings or search statements.

Term, Successors, Contest

From the book The Clergyman’s Hand-book of Law, about Term, Successors, Contest (1): Where there is no term of office fixed, the presumption is that an officer continues as such until proof to the contrary is established,282or until his successor shall have been elected and shall have qualified.283 Also, the officers elected for a certain term can not be amoved by electing new officers before the end of the term.284 When officers or committees have been elected “for the ensuing year,” they shall hold office until superseded by their duly elected successors. Where two sets of officers were elected at a meeting of a religious corporation and the set that was elected according to the charter continued in office by appointment thereafter, it was too late for the irregularly elected officers to make a contest for the offices after the term for which they had been elected had expired.285

Resources

Notes and References

1. Charles M. Scanlan, The Clergyman’s Hand-book of Law. The Law of Church and Grave (1909), Benziger Brothers, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago

See Also

• Religion
• Church