[higgins-dev] Telecon to discuss alternatives to Node

["Paul Trevithick" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Although Entity was the winner of the vote, it was decided at the Higgins call last Thursday that we needed a dedicated call to make sure that we’re all on the same page as to exactly what we’re naming here. We felt that we needed at least one of the folks proposing the winning “Entity” term to be present on the call before we can finalize this issue. The non-Entity folks were not convinced that we’re all seeing the problem (never mind the solution) the same way.

 

To try to get to closure, I’ve created: http://doodle.ch/7sfxpr6hvu29wnys to pick a good time on Wednesday to discuss this.

 

One more thing...

 

Nodes don’t just represent people and their interconnections in the social graph. Nodes (along with Attributes) are the building blocks for representing everything: People, Groups, Events, Documents, Postal Addresses in a Context.

 

Speaking of which, here’s an example of a Node representing some partial aspect of a Person Entity that has an attribute “hasAddress” whose value is a Node representing a postal address. When the value of an attribute is a Node, we call this a “complex” (as opposed to a literal) value. Literal values are drawn as squares.

 

 

[If you’re familiar with RDF you’ll see that a Higgins Node is almost exactly the same concept as an RDF node.]

 

If, after the discussion, we all think we really are seeing the issues the same way, then we’ll settle on Entity as the Node replacement, as it was the most popular term.

 

-Paul

 

I did think of one other word too: “item”.