HGraph

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Motivation

The initial motivation for HGraph was to address a number of limitations of IdAS 1.1.

Higgins-based application have a need to conveniently manage metadata about regular entities. Examples include the need to cleanly separate provenance metadata entities from the base entities, or the need to be able to associate a set of attributes with a complex-valued (link-valued) attribute.

This is currently quite awkward to achieve with IdAS 1.1. IdAS 1.1 can be thought of as context-centric. Whereas the authoritative context for a given entityId (aka a UDI) can be discovered dynamically, there is no easy and fast way to assemble all of the other (non-authoritative) contexts that may also make statements about a given entity (of the same entityId). In practice this is sufficiently awkward that the general IdAS idiom is to simply not do so, and to only have a single context for information about an entity. In practice a given entityid typically only occurs in a single context--its authoritative context.

...to be continued