Relationships

Overview

Relationships link two concepts together. Relationships act as a description of how two things are related.

The two concepts linked together by a relationship are called the Subject (of the relationship) and the Object (of the relationship).

Relationships are always directional, they link concepts together in a single direction. In the illustration below, the Subject is the left hand concept, the Object is the right hand concept.

Creating relationships between 2 concepts is simple in the Rainbird Studio. Select the starting concept (the Subject) and click Add relationship. Then simply click the ending concept (the Object).

Only string concepts can be used as a subject. Any concept type can be used as the object.

Just enter a name that describes the relationship between the 2 concepts and click Add.

Naming relationships to ensure they are clear, concise and meaningful is important. Follow the Academy course Naming Relationships for more guidance.

You need to be logged in to access the course via the link. No account? sign-up here.

Validation

Relationship names must:

• Be unique

• Be less than 2,000 characters

• Not contain quotation marks "

Relationship Features

Relationships have many features to assist you with modelling your knowledge. These will be summarised here, but for more guidance on how to use these features in practice it is recommended you follow our training on the Academy.

Singular or Plural

A relationship can either represent facts that are:

1. Singular (default): these are one-to-one relationships e.g. a person can only be born in one country.

2. Plural: these are one-to-many relationships e.g. a person can have lived in many countries.

Toggling plural on will impact the behaviour of the reasoning engine when running a query. Because there are many facts that could be created for this relationship, the engine will apply many strategies to identify as many facts as it can, be that processing rules multiple times (this can impact performance), asking users multiple choice questions or asking the user even when facts have already been identified from other sources, such as stored in the KM, from a datasource, injected or inferred from rules.

Active Plural toggle. This is switched off by default.

The plural switch will be disabled if the object concept is a boolean (i.e. true/false or mutually exclusive)

Question configuration

For some solutions you will configure your knowledge map so it will ask an end-user to provide the data. This is useful when the data cannot be obtained from any other source and cannot be inferred, but is necessary to provide a decision.

This is most useful in consultative solutions where the digital expert (the Rainbird Knowledge Map) would ask for necessary information from the end-user in order to arrive at a decision.

The ability for Rainbird to ask questions can be turned on or off and this is covered in the Question Configuration section.

pageQuestion Configuration

Rules

Within your knowledge map you create rules to infer new data (facts). This all covered in our rules section.

pageRules

Academy

Online courses for how to best to use these features are available in the Rainbird Academy.