The Relationship OSID provides the ability to relate and manage data between OsidObjects.

Relationships

The Relationship OSID defines a Relationship that can be used to explicitly identify a relationship between two OSID Ids and manage information specific to the relationship.

The Relationship OSID is a building block on which relationships defined in the context of other OSIDs can be built. Examples of relationships include the enrollment record of a student in a Course or the commitment or a person to an Event.

The Relationship OSID depends on the relationship Type to indicate the nature of the relationship including its natural ordering between the source and destination Ids. A relationship of type "friend" may place the peers in either order and be queryable in either order. A relationship of type "parent" is between a father peer and a son peer, but not the other way around. Queries of the son peer based on the "parent" type is not equiavelent to queries of the father peer based on the "parent" type.

Such directional relationships may be accompanied by two types. An additional relationship type of "child" can be used with the son peer to determine the father peer. The directionality and the inverse among the types are part of the type definition.

Family Cataloging

Relationships may be cataloged using the Family interface.

Sub Packages

The Relationship OSID includes a Relationship Rules OSID for controlling the enable status of Relationships.