5 - Introduction to Link Types

Representing relationships between objects in the Ontology enhances operational workflows. One reason is that a formal link enables quick pivots between among directly and transitively related objects. Your operations analyst accessing an alert inbox application, for example, may want to move easily from a flight alert to its associated flight. In this task, you’ll set up the Ontology to support such a workflow, which you’ll see in action in a future tutorial.

Below is a depiction of the link types you want to establish, in which there is a one-to-many relationship between the linked object types:

🔨 Create a new link type

1. Return to the Overview tab of your object type in the Ontology Manager, scroll down to the LINK TYPES block, and click ⊕ Create new link type.
2. On the subsequent page, click into the blank Choose an object type field on the right. Then search for and select the object type titled [Example Data] Flight.
3. On the left, you should see your Flight Alert object type; on the right, [Example Data] Flight. The right object type displays its primary key, and on the left, you must select the matching key from our object type.
4. Select Flight Id from the Foreign key field on the left.
5. The UI now displays inferred link and API names. You can leave these default values.

📚 Recommended Reading (~7 min read)

Like the property editor, the link type editor has many tuning options. Having created a basic link type, pease now take the time to review the following Ontology product documentation pages:

• Link types overview
• Create a link type