Term for reverse lookup of concepts Suppose I have envisioned a concept that I am fairly certain has been explored before. I can describe its nature and its characteristics, but I do not know the formal name of the concept, nor its history and prior development. My objective is to formalize my research by identifying the concept’s formal name and basing my research on its preexisting foundations. (My research may or may not elaborate/extend the current state of research; it could simply be a search for an existing concept I want to investigate). What would be the name (ie. the definiendum) of the process of finding both an existing concept and porting your notions of that concept onto the formalisms previously established for that concept?

Up to now, I have been informally using the terms rebasing and porting, as in


  rebasing/porting my own informal understanding of the concept onto its formal foundations


If no such word exists for what I’ve described, I do offer rebasing and porting as self-descriptive definiendums.

Perhaps the first part of my definition, i.e., finding an existing concept, can be considered optional as it is well-described by reverse lookup; however, the latter part is key.

To make it more clear what it is I am after, here is an example: Alice is studying networks, and exploring how to permit communication between any two nodes using the fewest connections possible. As she develops this concept, she suspects it might have already been fleshed out in academia, so she searches for the name of the concept and finds spanning trees. Now that she knows what it is she has conceived, she can explore the concept further. She can also translate (port, “rebase”, etc) her personal, informal language, notations, conventions, and concepts onto their corresponding formal equivalents previously established in academia. What is the name of the translation/porting/rebasing/etc process described in italics in the previous sentence?
I'm not sure that any such specialized term exists, or at least I have never heard of such.  The process, however, is quite familiar to me.  I find it most interesting when I discover that several different subjects have all approached the same topic from different directions, each typically having invented its own largely unrelated terminology.

As for what to call it? I would typically refer to it simply as searching for related work and then connecting my work to the prior results.  It might be a fun target for a neologism, though!