What exactly is a profile?

As we saw, a profile seems to be quite a poor, powerless thing. But once the OWm2 engine collected and assembled all the linguistic dependant content assigned to a given profile, we got a totally different picture.

What we get is a dictionary entry, in the usual sense of an expression = definition equation. This happens because during the linguistic content assembly process, two families of hierarchical tree structures are used:

1. expressions
2. definitions

By now it should be clear that there is no structural difference whatsoever between the two. They are made by assembling the same multimedia_text objects by means of the same tree structures. A single unified set of routines serves them both. The difference between them is all in the role they play for human users.

A basic point is that since a profile is a language independent object (it is created as a empty set, as far as linguistic dependent content is concerned) none of the two tree families is mandatory. You can use a profile to collect expressions only or definitions only or any mix of the two.

The second important point is that this structure is not limited to dictionary management. Basically everything can be represented as an equation of content elements.

A news service or a CMS may use the expression tree to store articles, and the definition tree to store those small teasers that usually get published in the front-page. A software localization service may store a message codename in one of the two trees and its localized versions in another. A textual repository may store a full book in the expression, and a short description of the text in the definition. A Corpus Juris may have the text of its Laws in the expression, while serving commentaries in the definition tree, etc.

Obviously, no such service will be happy to call the two members expression and definition. But this is really not a problem, because we are in a multilayered architecture. All they need is to properly rename these entities in their GUIs, the logics remain unchanged anyway.

The members of the equation are fully interchangeable exactly because, as we have seen in the very beginning, a multimedia_text object is absolutely unaware of how it's going to be used. So our search engine can analyse the whole of our content base without needing to jump here and there. And it can do it really quick, even if we get to host billions of entries.

But the most important point is that a profile object can now emerge anywhere in its linguistic phase space. That is, we have an entity that while being absolutely language independent is also fully capable of materializing itself within just any linguistic space. And the more original and/or translated linguistic content we assign to this profile object, the more capable of adapting to different users and cultures it gets.

We shall build a lot upon this, as you'll see.