Profile objects

NOTE! You will want to read this to fully understand what we mean by "profile". In short, by profile we mean the abstract concept that manifests itself in language. The idea of a cat, that keeps together all possible ways to say "cat" in all possible languages.

If you look at its database definition, a profile object appears to be one of the most abstract and impotent objects we have in our catalogue. In fact it doesn't do anything, it simply provides a reference that content can use to be semantically grouped.

By itself it doesn't contain any information whatsoever, but since it inherits object it can be classified, licensed etc. It is by definition a language independent information,as things can exist long before anyone gives them a name.

If you look at the the database table that maps profile objects in the database you are probably going to think it's a waste of space. It's simply repeating the same identifying number issued by object. So if you are thinking that we could without this table, by just adding an is_profile switch to object... you are right. So far we have kept it, as it makes documentation more readable to have it, but it may disappear in the future, to become simply a flag.

As we have seen, a multimedia_text object is assigned to given profile, so we can collect all that means the same thing. We still do not know how to tell an expression from a definition, in a dictionary structure, but we shall see that in the next chapter.