Bundt User's Manual · Bundt Toolset version 1.0.1.0

Instance Models

An instance model represents a portion of the world in terms of the things that we observe in it. For example, an instance model of a city would describe the world in terms of the individual buildings, streets and squares in that city.

Every instance models relies necessarily on a type model to which it conforms. This is necessary because type models specify the necessary categories that we employ to classify and organize entities in an instance model.

Details

Instance models are very useful because of their specificity. They contain as much data as we want about individual things in the world, acting as databases or datasets that we can query and process.

Conformance to type models

As introduced above, every instance model conforms to a type model. The associated type model determine what categories exist as far as the instance model is concerned, and therefore what kinds of things may be described by it.

Contents of instance models

Instance models are majorly composed of objects, values and links:

Objects represent individual entities in the world, each one pertaining to a class in the associated type model. For example, an instance model about Italian cities may contain a City object for Rome and a Building object for the Colosseum.
Values represent simple data of these entities, each one pertaining to an attribute of the associated class. For example, an object of the City class (which may have Name and Population attributes) would have a value for Name (such as "Rome") and a value for Population (such as 2,880,000).
Links represent connections between objects, each one pertaining to an association between the classes involved. For example, a Building object such as the Colosseum and a City object such as Rome could be connected through a IsLocatedIn link.

Instance Models

Details

Conformance to type models

Contents of instance models

See Also