{
  "id": "topic.subject",
  "term": "topic",
  "sense": "subject",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 8,
  "arena": "topic",
  "domain": "common",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a subject that is what information or messages are about",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "subject.entity",
      "information.knowledge",
      "message.information"
    ],
    "interaction": "The subject and information are what messages are about.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "aboutness of messages",
      "thematic focus in communication",
      "shared referent in exchange"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Hubble Space Telescope's 2009 servicing mission corrected its vision, restoring focus to its scientific observations.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "CERN's Large Hadron Collider circulates proton beams at 99.999999% of light speed, maintaining collision conditions for particle discovery.",
      "domain": "physics"
    },
    {
      "text": "The U.S. Census Bureau conducts a nationwide count every ten years to update demographic and political representation data.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "subject.entity",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    },
    {
      "id": "information.knowledge",
      "note": "abstracts",
      "type": "abstracts"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "topic",
    "topics"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added message.information (L7) to components since the definition and interaction rely on the concept of messages, which was missing in the declared components."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-topic.subject"
}