Document

The central Entity for a standalone page of content in Hypermedia.

A documentID has one Owner View, which is the latest version from the original author. It also has different Variants from the contributors to the Document.

In the future, the Author or Contributor will be able to Create a branch of the document. For more Primary Views, the Author will need to Duplicate the document.

Document Owner

The Account that made the original Change of the Entity

Author

An Account that has made a Change to a Document. The only way for a different Author to take over is by duplicating the document. An Author can create Variants or Branches.

Owner View

The current version of a Document, according to the Main Author

Group

An Entity that manages a set of Documents and includes members. The members include the creator (Group Owner) and the list of Group Editors that the Owner added. The group has links to content with labels (PathNames).

Group Owner

The creator of a Group, who has permission to modify the group membership and the PathNames

Group Editor

Accounts who are allowed to modify the PathNames of the Group

Group PathName

A labeled piece of content within a Group. Each PathName may be used as a URL if the Group is published to a site. A PathName links to a Document at a specific Version.

Identified with a URL like: hm://g/GROUP_EID/PATH_NAME

Document Variant

A Leaf Change that is not part of the Main View Document History.

A Variant is a Leaf Change of a Main Author, External Author, or the Version published to a Group.

Two variants here: 2@Author & 4@Alice

One variant: 5@Author

If 5@Author would be 5@Alice, then there are 2 variants: 2@Author and 5@Alice

Document Variant History

A plain list of Changes viewed per Variant. The list only shows older versions. To access newer Changes, users will need to switch to another Variant.

Version

An arbitrary set of Changes, identified by the leaf change IDs and concatenated with a period (.)

Change

A Blob that describes a mutation to an Entity. Contains Change Deps, an object to describe modifications to those Deps, and a signature from an Account

Change Deps (Dependencies)

The list of Change IDs that came before a Change. When evaluating the Entity state at a certain Change, Deps are merged together before the mutation is applied.

Leaf Change

A Change which is not used as a Dep by any other Changes

Entity

A mutable thing that is saved in Hypermedia. Identified by an ID such as hm://ENTITY_TYPE/ENTITY_EID

For some Entities, the Entity ID (EID) contains cryptographic proof of the Creator, whose private key is used along with random data to create the EID

Our Entities: Document, Group, Account Profile

Entity Owner

The Account that made the original Change of the Entity

Account

The individual users in the system, who may have several Devices

Identified by a public key

The private key is typically derived with a BIP-39 set of 12 words, which is used as a seed for a SLIP-10 key derivation

Device

A private key saved on a user’s computer, associated with an Account via a Device Authorization Blob

Blob

A piece of Hypermedia data

Identified by an IPFS CID

The CID contains information regarding the encoding, such as “file” or JSON encoded as DAG-CBOR