Grooves: why are "data" designed as properties and not nodes ?

[Christopher Travers]

Hola Anders,

Say I wanted to talk to you about the country Canada. I'm not talking
about "Canada" the word, but rather the geographical region which has
property called "name", which has the value "Canada".

A Grove is an abstract data model of a "thing". When we talk about
a thing, we talk in terms of the properties and characteristics
which that thing exhibits. In groveland, these properties are captured
as name/value pairs and organized into classes. The set of classes that
might be found in a grove is called a property set. When I create a
node, I'm creating an instance of the properties from a given class.
The node itself is just the container which holds that information.

For example I might create a property set for geography. One of the node
classes in my property set might be "country". Some of the properties that
a country node might exhibit would be name, location, population, etc...
What I have created is the abstract data model for a country "thing". When
I create my node, I create an in memory representation of that abstraction.

Hope this helps,
Chris

On Thu, Sep 23, 1999, Anders W. Tell wrote:
 
> Could somone explain the design rationale why properties and not node
> carries data ?

-- 
Chris Travers                      Nortel Networks
Applied Learning Technology        P.O. Box 3511, Stn. C
ctravers at nortelnetworks.com        Ottawa, On, Canada K1Y 4H7

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