Object objects

At first sight, this object thing seems to do very little, let alone a very important thing: it contains a flag called mediated. When mediated is set TRUE, it means that the content is language dependant, and in order to be meaningful for a user it must be put into the most appropriate linguistic phase.

I can see a lot of eyebrows moving. This is a dictionary and we are to use it to translate things, right? So what sort of content can be language independent? Well, suppose you decide to have a picture that has no text and explains a concept. In what language is your your picture?

Besides, as we shall later see, object is not only included into multimedia_text objects. All the other entities that are using it carry exclusively language independent information, so it is very important that we have a switch to tell an object when its linguistic services are needed.

So okay, to return to our doubts about content, now we know that a given content part is expressed in "some" language, but how do we get to know in which one?

The answer is again in what object does, because object is the unified support for classification. Anything that includes object can be classified. So there is a classification telling us that a given object is expressed in some language, by using a given script, and we can retrieve it.

Exactly in the same way we can retrieve copyright information for this object, we can retrieve the source from where it came and the full list of classes to which this content was assigned. It would be very nice if we could immediately explain how classification works, but we still need to introduce some basic concepts, before we can do it.

The next step introduces us to our main semantic catalogue, the profile object.