Overview of Relationships

Relationships are the connectors between instances of an entity. By specifying the relationship you are specifying whether an instance of an entity is related to one or more of the instances of another (or even the same) entity group.

Relationships define how entities relate to one another so that rules can be written that reason from one entity to another entity. For example, to write a rule from a Global attribute to a child entity attribute, you use the text of the relationship between the Global and the child.

Every relationship has:

• A source entity
• A target entity
• A relationship type, and
• Relationship text

By specifying a relationship you are specifying whether an instance of an entity is related to one or more of the instances of another (or even the same) entity group.

For example, you could have:

• An entity "the person", and
• An entity "the vehicle", and
• Instances of the entity 'the person' called "Pedro", and "Teresa", and
• Instances of the entity 'the vehicle' called "Car", "Utility", and "Truck".

 

You could then specify a relationship from the person (the source entity) to the car (the target entity) called "the person's vehicles". In this scenario, there would be two relationship instances, because each person has a list of the vehicles that belong to them. That is, Pedro has a Utility and a Truck, and Teresa has a Car and a Utility.