Documentation of the Entity Table

• Concepts
• Entities in the Entity Table
  Definitions and examples of each of the different kinds of Entity
• Fields in the Entity Table
  a table showing the mSQL details of the fields in the Entity table
• Overview of Field Usage by each Entity Class
  • id
    details of the contents of the ID field
  • name
  • type
  • person_id
  • dateNtime
    structure of the dateNtime field
  • arg1
  • arg2
• Dump of the Entity Table
  most of the current contents of the Entity table
• Open Questions

Natural Selection

supported in so far as all entities are subject to evaluation and subsequent filtering and sorting

Nesting

• Forums contain Nodes (and other things) through appropriately structured 'id' fields.
• Nodes can contain Forums through Edges of the EdgeType 'contains'.

Inheritance

Models and their NodeTypes and EdgeTypes can inherit characteristics from other Models.

Instantiation

When one entity is the 'type' of another entity (and they're of different classes), then its as if the first entity is a classic OOP Class and the other is an instantance of that Class.

 +-----------------+----------+--------+----------+-----+
 |     Field       |   Type   | Length | Not Null | Key |
 +-----------------+----------+--------+----------+-----+
 | id              | char     | 10     | Y        | Y   |
 | name            | char     | 40     | Y        | N   |
 | type            | char     | 10     | Y        | N   |
 | person_id       | char     | 10     | Y        | N   |
 | dateNtime       | char     | 19     | Y        | N   |
 | arg1            | char     | 10     | Y        | N   |
 | arg2            | char     | 10     | Y        | N   |
 +-----------------+----------+--------+----------+-----+

limits on the numbers of each kind of entity

structure of the ID field on a per-entity basis

19950927173459 represents:

1995

4 digit year

09

month

27

day

17

hour

34

minute

59

second

1. Should Criteria be inherited along the Model hierarchy? (i.e. id='Cmmmmccccc')
   pros:
   • World Views could then enjoy inheritance: people could employ familiar World Views in Forums based on Models they have experience with.
   cons:
   • Do all Forums based on the same Model require the same set of Criteria?
   • Does this mean new Criteria need to be added at the Model level?
   • Why not at the Forum level? Can we do both?
2. How should Display and Filter functions be inherited? An advantage of inheritance is that there's no need to recreate stuff you've already got elsewhere.
3. How can Display functions be designed to have meaning across the Presentation Styles (HTML,GIF,VRML...)?
4. How should 'versioning' work?
   pros:
   • without it, people are tempted to create new Entities because an existing Entity embodies the right idea, but suffers from imperfect execution
   • this is bad since it causes an explosion of maintenance concerns as people struggle to ensure that the links the original participated in are replicated for the improved Entity
   
   cons:
   • having versions causes either inaccuracy in evaluations or a different kind of maintenance explosion as people struggle to keep their evaluations of changing entities up to date.
5. How can intercommunication between servers happen?
   • Is the equivalent of DNS required for Forum to Host mapping?
   • Is there some work in the VRML/CyberSpace field which is pertinent?
   • Any NNTP tricks or concepts worth snarfing?
   • How will we deal with Forums too big or busy to fit on a single server?
6. For what conditions should the interior of the Engine be optimised?
   • Forums are too big to fit in RAM, so 'stream' the data through...
   • Disk performance is the bottleneck, so load a whole Forum into RAM and then process it.
   • Obviously, an adaptive system that can tune itself to either condition would be optimal. How can we do this?