Philosophy

For me DeepaMehta is an attempt to understand and describe some fundamental ideas about Life, the Universe and Everything (thx Douglas!). Behind many ideas and concepts we try to implement into the software, there often are endless discussions and deep thoughts about general/universal principals. To me this philosophic exchange is as important as the vision of its meaningful implementation into a software based tool - which I really hope we will achieve some day.

Type - Instance

Type–token distinction (source: Wikipedia)

In disciplines such as philosophy and knowledge representation, the type–token distinction is a distinction that separates a concept from the objects which are particular instances of the concept. For example, the particular bicycle in your garage is a token of the type of thing known as "The bicycle." Whereas, the bicycle in your garage is in a particular place at a particular time, that is not true of "the bicycle" as used in the sentence: "The bicycle has become more popular recently." In logic, the distinction is used to clarify the meaning of symbols of formal languages.

Types are often understood ontologically as being concepts. They do not exist anywhere in particular because they are not physical objects. Types may have many tokens. However, types are not directly producible as tokens are. You may, for instance, show someone the bicycle in your garage, but you cannot show someone "The bicycle." Tokens always exist at a particular place and time and may be shown to exist as a concrete physical object.

It can be quite useful to distinguish between an abstract "type" of thing, and the various physical "tokens" or examples of that thing. This type-token distinction is illustrated by way of examples. If we say that two people "have the same car", we may mean that they have the same type of car (e.g. the same brand and model), or the same particular token of the car (e.g. they share a single vehicle). This distinction is useful in other ways, during discussion of language. In the phrase "Grendel is Grendel is Grendel is Grendel", there are only two types of words ("Grendel" and "is") but there are seven tokens (four "Grendel" and three "is" tokens).

In DeepaMehta a token is called an 'instance.'

Entity Type : A collection of entities that share common properties or characteristics. Entity Instance: A single occurrence of a particular entity type is called entity instance.

Item - Property

Everything (every item) can have an endless amount of properties. Every property can be an item in itself.

In DeepaMehta we call an item or entity a 'topic'.

Atoms - Holons

The idea of the atom is that it is the impartible smallest part that everything is made of. Today we know that science does not know much about the smalles part yet, because they find smaller and smaller parts every once in while. And maybe it the end it all comes down to energy and imagination anyways.

Ken Wilber (source: Wikipedia): Holons

"A key idea of Wilber's is to study and categorize items in terms of their nature as a holon, a term deriving from the writings of Arthur Koestler. He observed that it seems every entity and concept shares a dual role: being both an autonomous, self-reliant unit (whole entity) unto itself, and also a part of one (or more) other wholes. Examples include the way in which a cell in an organism is both a whole as a cell and and at the same time a part of another whole, the organism. Likewise a letter is a self-existing entity and simultaneously an integral part of a word, which then is part of a sentence, which is part of a paragraph, which is part of a page; and so on. Everything from quarks to matter to energy to ideas can be looked at in this way. The relation between individuals and society is not the same as between cells and organisms though, because individual holons can be members but not parts of social holons."

If we tried to describe things on the level of its atoms (smallest part), they would be meaningless, because we could only count the atoms in the end. So what ever the smallest part may be, what makes them relevant are their linkages.

'In DeepaMehta we call the linkage an association.'

Whole - Part

If every item can be devided into its parts and every part can be an item itself, then we need to define a role for each part. We need to clearify if the role of an item

Association - Aggregation - Composition

Private - Shared - Public

Topicmap - Workspace - Domain

Distance - Relevance