A set of overlapping deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) segments, which combine to form a consensus region, is called contig. Contiguous sequences of nucleotide bases form contigs.
Sequence contigs are units in which the sequences of overlapping reads are assembled -sequences that are contiguous or touching (in the case of bottom-up sequencing projects).
The genomic DNA is broken into many small fragments and the fragments are sequenced. These fragments are then reassembled back to contigs and then into the entire genome.
The overlapping physical segments contained in clones are also called contigs in top-down sequencing projects. The contigs are sets of clones, which overlap to form a conterminous stretch of DNA.
A scaffold is also called a supercontig. It is an ordered set of contigs which are linked by sequences. We get these sequences from the paired-end information of long paired-end libraries. Scaffold is the gapped collections of sequences of contigs joined together.