What is the ideal "quantum of information", "minimal semantic unit" or “semantic atom” and why to ask such a question? There is a lot of pain associated with this, often not even realized. We offer a solution, but first you need to figure out what it is for. We recommend you to read the first article in a series.

Retrospective

Relational tables, document oriented databases, jsonb stores ... We often use the model in the table/collection as the semantic atom. The model consists of columns/fields with a different structure, and reflects some real object or abstract concept defined by the author.

This approach creates problems:

• Lots of address spaces. (If you do not see it as a problem, then soon where will be an article exclusively on this topic, and you will see why this problem is real).
• Many control points of the data structure that are expensive to change.
• Compatibility only at the level defined by the author.
• Failure to fully describe something new without creating another table/collection.
• The inability to separate objects from the relationships between them.

All of these problems are addressed in the Deep.Case associative model of data.

If you are interested in optimization or search by ranges in a graph, there will be a link here to that article.

Let's dig into it

Deep.Case operates with the Link concept as a minimal semantic unit / quantum of information.

Links table

Links (a network of links) is very similar to a graph, however, the graph has a division into nodes and edges referring only to nodes. Links do not divide these address spaces. This allows links to refer to links and carry any meaning that the author of the data models can put in them.

Link structure

The link structure consists of the required unique id and type_id used as the type of this link. The optional from_id and to_id fields can only be specified together.

Types for creating links are easily created by the user himself within the project model, or supplied with imported model packages.