Relationships between concepts are either singular or plural.
Singular relationships will only consider one relationship instance of an object, normally the most likely result, when running a query. Plural relationships allow Rainbird to create and consider multiple relationship instances of an object and deliver multiple answers to a query. By default, a relationship is singular, but it is important to set this attribute according to the requirements of a relationship. In both cases, the Certainty factor for the result must be above the minimum certainty factor (if using).
The singular/plural attribute can be set when creating a new relationship, or when editing an existing relationship, by switching the plural slider in the relationship settings screen on or off.
Figure 1: Changing the singular/plural attribute
For example, if a knowledge map was built to determine what language a person might speak, Rainbird might use the country a person is born in to work out the answer. The relationship between the concepts “Person” and “Country”, “born in”, would be singular as a person can only be born in one country:
Figure 2: A singular relationship, ‘born in’
However, a person might be able to speak multiple languages, so the relationship between the concept “Person” and “Language”, “speaks language’, would be plural:
Figure 3: A plural relationship, ‘speaks language’
The RBLang below will generate a knowledge map that uses singular and plural relationships. Click on ‘Export .rbird’ to download the knowledge map or ‘copy RBLang’ and paste the code directly into Rainbird
Query & Results
You will need to run a query on the relationship ‘speaks language’ for an example of a query that uses both singular and plural relationships.
Version 1.01 – Last Update: 16/02/2021
