Help:Wontology Concepts

From Wontology

This is a brief summary that relates key concepts within a wontology. There is a more narrative introduction in the help page describing how information is represented as relationships, and each term defined below links to that term's entry in our Glossary.

• A wontology is made up of items and connections.
• An item represents something, concrete or abstract, that the wontology describes.
• A connection represents a particular relationship between two items, with the type of relationship identified by a third item.

• Each item has a type and several standard text fields
  • The text fields include its Name, its Title, and optionally a text Description.
    • An item's Name should be short, and is used to create URLs and other computer-parsed symbols.
    • An item's Title should be a one-line description of what the item represents.
    • An item's (optional) Description is intended to be read by people to understand/maintain the contents of the wontology.
  • An item's type can be Category, Individual, or Property.
    • Category items can contain (in hierarchical relationships) Category and/or Individual items.
    • Individual items can contain only Individual items and not Category items.
    • Only Property items can be referred to as a connection's predicate.

• Each connection references three items, a subject, a predicate, and an object.
• Two connections in the ontology cannot be identical (that is, refer to exactly the same three items in the same order).
• Connections are directional, and always go "from" the subject item "to" the object item.
  • Predicate types (represented by Property-type items) can be defined so that creating a connection using that predicate implies a second connection going from the explicit connection's object back to its subject.
  • An implied connection cannot be "duplicated" by the explicit creation of an identical connection.

• The meaning of a Property-type item is determined by its relationships to other Property items (Properties).
• Property-type items can be the subjects and objects of connections just like the other item types can.
• Based on their relationships, some Properties represent hierarchical relationships and some represent peer relationships.
  • Hierarchical and peer relationships are opposites of each other; a single Property cannot indicate both.
  • A relationship need not be either hierarchical or peer.