About ConStore

Concept Networks Constore is a light-weight model-driven storage facility for Concept-Nets. It provides an object-oriented programming interface. Concept-Nets form a basis of many applications in which the data organization can be viewed as networks of concepts with vertices representing concepts and edges representing relations between them.

Model-driven Storage Typically, a concept network is a model of something real. For example, an activity diagram expressed in UML is a concept network that models various activities in a system, and their interdepencies. Constore provides a model-driven storage facility for concept networks, wherein, a meta-model is first created to establish the kinds of concept networks that can be created as instances of the metamodel.

Entities and Relations Constore supports the creation of models and metamodels of concept networks in terms of entities and relations between them. An Example The following example is illustrative of applications that can be created under the Constore system.

Example: Movie-Net

The above network is a model of a cinematic domain. It's meta-model is represented on the right. The model thus can have persons and movies, and also the links between them. A variety of relations (i.e. links) are possible. In the above model, we have instances of entity 'Person' as 'Amir Khan', 'Ashutosh Gowarikar', 'A.R. Rahaman', 'Shahrukh Khan'. Similarly, 'Swades', 'Baazi', 'Lagan', 'Tare Zamin Par' are instances of Entity 'Movie'. Relations 'Actor', 'Director', 'Musician' are instances of Relation 'Role'. It can be observed that the model on the left hand side strictly follows the rules established by the meta-model on the right hand side.

What can Constore do in such a case? Thus it is not possible to have a relation between a person and another person as per the meta-model on the right hand side. The constore system allows a user to express a desired metamodel and then an actual model can be created in the system.

Once such a model and meta-model is created, it is possibel to use other interfaces provided by Constore for navigation and retireval of information from the stored networks.

Entities and Relations can both have their internal attributes. Attributes can be singleton values such as 'age', 'address', or they can also be collections of values such as 'languages known', 'release towns'.

Networks created using Constore can be emailed, uploaded, moved easily. What the user needs on the other end is a constore installation.