Overview

A property of an object type is the schema definition of a characteristic of a real-world entity or event. A property value refers to the value of a property on an object, or a single instance of that real world entity or event.

For example, in the Ontology Manager, an Employee object type may have properties employee number, start date, and role. The notional employee “Melissa Chang” may have property values “11502” for employee number, “October 9, 2016” for start date, and “software engineer” for role.

Similarly, in the Ontology Manager, a Flight object type may have properties departure date, arrival date, and passenger count. The object “JFK → SFO 24-02-2021” may have property values “24-02-2021” for departure date, “25-02-2021” for arrival date, and “150” for passenger count.

The concepts underpinning the Ontology have analogous concepts in the structure of a dataset. The definition of a property in the Ontology is analogous to that of a column in a dataset, while the definition of a property value is analogous to that of a field in the dataset. For example, an Employee dataset may have columns for departure date, arrival date, and passenger count. In this case, a single field will have the value “11502” for the employee number column of the row for employee “Melissa Chang.”

Rather than being an abstract data model, the Foundry Ontology maps each ontological concept to an organization's actual data, enabling this data asset to power real-world applications. Property values are created and displayed in user applications by adding backing datasources to an object type in the Ontology Manager. To create property values for properties employee number, start date, and role on objects of type Employee, an organization will add backing datasources to the Employee object type and feed their employee directory and other enterprise data into the Ontology.

Supported property types