Semantics is the meaning of signs, in particular of texts and words. It is quite obvious that semantics plays an important role in the coding of medical diagnoses and procedures, because the content of the words used is certainly more important than their outer form, their clothing of letters.

Computer programs can cope perfectly with numbers, but it is common knowledge that they have problems with words. Everyone knows the results of text translation programs like Bablefish, Google and others. These types of program do not function semantically, but by means of a string comparison. They compare the input with large tables that contain as many words and word combinations as possible. But no matter how large the tables are, the meaning of the words cannot be grasped with a mere string comparison, because the meaning is not in the sequence of letters: “fracture” and “broken bone” mean the same thing despite the different sequence of letters, and not every “crane” is a “bird”.

That is why we differentiate between “word” and “concept”. A word is the outer form, whereas the concept is the content of the word, i.e. what we mean with the word. The concept and the word are not the same. Semantics deals with the content of the words, i.e. with the concepts.