Overview

The Foundry Ontology allows for granular, robust, and flexible security controls for all ontology entities. These entities include ontology metadata, such as object types, link types, and action types, as well as ontology data like objects and links (the instantiations of metadata).

We can conceptualize the Ontology's authorization structure on these two levels of metadata and data. The remaining pages in this section of documentation explain the different mechanisms that comprise the authorization and permissions system for ontology data.

Ontology metadata

Ontology metadata refers to type-level information about ontology entities such as object types, link types, and action types. For example, the metadata for an object type may include display name, property names, property data types, and description. Metadata does not refer to the actual data or values of an object type’s properties or primary key; these are considered ontology data.

Learn more about ontology metadata permissions.

Ontology data

Ontology data are the actual primary key and property values for specific instances of an ontology entity. For example, an Airplane object type can have an object instance with a Plane ID property having the value my_plane_id1, and a Maximum Occupancy property having value 240.

Learn more about ontology data permissions.