Technical manifestation¶
A machine-facing Concept Manifestation in code, data, metadata, queries, ontologies, shapes, taxonomies, APIs, or source repositories
What is a technical manifestation?¶
A Technical Manifestation is how a Concept appears in the digital landscape: code, databases, APIs, statements, ontologies, shapes, and source repositories.
Business Terms focus on how people talk. Technical Manifestations focus on how systems speak. Linking both to the same Concept gives traceability from business language to concrete implementation details.
Why it matters¶
- Automated discovery: repositories can be scanned for where Concepts appear.
- Impact analysis: a Concept change can be traced to affected code, queries, columns, shapes, and ontology terms.
- Transparency: business meaning is linked to the exact technical surfaces that implement it.
Technical manifestations in code and data¶
Technical Manifestations include symbols and resources such as:
- variable names, for example
_customerorcust_id - SPARQL variables, for example
?customer - SQL columns and tables
- Cypher labels, relationship types, and properties
- API parameters and JSON field names
- OWL classes, properties, individuals, and axioms
- SHACL node shapes and property shapes
- SKOS concepts and concept schemes
Automated discovery¶
Technical Manifestations can often be discovered automatically by
scanning repositories and data artifacts. Each detected occurrence
can become a ManifestationOccurrence linked to a stable
Technical Manifestation.
Semantic and validation artifacts¶
OWL and SHACL bindings are Technical Manifestations too. A Concept
should not directly say that it represents hospital:Patient.
Instead, it links to an OWLClassManifestation whose
manifestationResource is hospital:Patient.
This keeps the Concept thin and lets one Concept have multiple ontology, shape, taxonomy, query, and code manifestations.
Facts¶
About these facts
We're not prescribing a full OWL ontology here. These are minimal facts you can use to build your own ontology, schema, or graph model.
TechnicalManifestation¶
- Subclass of ConceptManifestation
- All manifestation facts apply here.
- Literal value
- Use the exact token for variables, columns, identifiers, placeholders, and API parameters.
- Resource value
- Use an IRI for OWL, SHACL, SKOS, SQL, RDF, or other schema resources.
- Source occurrence
- Use an occurrence object for repository, file, line, column, commit, and language details.
Recommended subtypes¶
URIParameterManifestationSPARQLVariableManifestationSPARQLResultColumnManifestationOWLClassManifestationOWLPropertyManifestationOWLAxiomManifestationSHACLShapeManifestationSKOSConceptManifestationSQLTableManifestationSQLColumnManifestationCypherIdentifierManifestationJavaScriptIdentifierManifestationJSONFieldManifestation