Names and Occurrences

Names and occurrences are constructs that add properties to topics. Names are properties that are intended to provide some representation of a name or label for a topic - that representation is usually textual but need not be (it may, for example be a sound clip). Occurrences are properties that provide other information about a topic  - for example the social security number of a person would be recorded as an occurrence property on the topic that represents the person.

Both names and occurrences can be used to either store string data within the topic map itself or to reference a resource external to the topic map. No restriction is placed on what type of resource is addressed by a name or occurrence. It may be a static HTML page, an HTML page generated by ASP, a Web service or any other type of resource. Neither are names or occurrences restricted to the HTTP protocol - any address encoded as a URI can be used to address an external resource. As with associations, names and occurrences can be typed, using a topic to express the type, and a scope of validity can also be assigned to an occurrence.

The Web3 Platform allows the values of names and occurrences to be assigned a data-type which may be one of the following:

The URI data-type is used for all properties that reference external resources, the other data-types are used to process the property value and store it appropriately.