Welcome to the DIGITAL MEMEX glossary

Here we highlight some key concepts for building an app with DMX.

• Topicmap: visual content stored independently of any other content made up of topics (all the little items) and associations (the lines between)
• Type: a simple or composite structure describing how information is represented in your machine
• Topic: an item of a specific Type representing concepts like an e-mail, a country, an organization, an individual file, an event or a software-module
• Association: a relationship of a specific type between two topics where each of the two topic plays a certain Role
• Role Type: an identifier for a role each two Topic plays in the resp. Association
• Topic Type: describing the data model/structure of any given Topic
• Association Type: describing the data model/structure of any given Association between two Topics
• Instance: an internal (a "systems") Association connecting the Topic or Association with its resp. Type
• Workspace: any of your contents have one (and only one) context assigned and this concept is currently called a workspace. A workspaces aggregates one or many Members, implements a specific SharingMode and has its own Topcimaps
• Sharing Mode: a setting any workspace has defining wether the Workspaces content is Private, Confidential, Collaborative, Public or Common
• Data type: classification of the fundamental types of of data: Number, Boolean, Text, HTML, Composite
• Composite: a Data Type that allows to store more complex types of data, a type which composes or aggregates other types in a cardinality of one or many
• Composition Definition: establishes a strong, direct dependence of the Child Type to the Parent Type
• Aggregation Definition: establishes a loose dependence of the Child Type to its Parent Type

Some more general terms we may use in this documentation but which are not specific to app development wit DMX:

• Graph database: the storage layer structuring your data as nodes and edges
• Frontend: the presentation layer of your application
• Application: Programm that visualizes data in a particular way
• Plugin: A module which bundles extra functionality for your application
• Backend: The data access and service layer of your application
• REST: REpresentational State Transfer is an architectural style, and an approach to HTTP communications that is often used in the development of Web services
• API: Application programming interfaces are used to realize inter-application communications