ObjectProperty

Objectproperty is a term that can refer to a property that relates objects. In general software engineering, a property is an attribute or characteristic of an object, exposing its state or capabilities through fields and accessors. In ontology and knowledge representation, an ObjectProperty is a specific kind of binary relation between individuals.

In OWL (Web Ontology Language), an ObjectProperty links two individuals (for example, hasParent relates a Person to another Person). It is distinct from a DataProperty, which relates an individual to a data value such as a string or number. ObjectProperties can be given domain and range restrictions, and may be declared with characteristics such as functional (at most one value per subject), inverseOf (the property has a reciprocal property), symmetric, transitive.

In programming languages, properties are the named attributes of an object, often accessed via dot notation. They may be implemented as fields with getters/setters. In JavaScript, properties can be data properties or accessors; in C#, properties wrap get and set methods; in Python, @property creates a managed attribute.

Use cases include modeling relationships between entities, controlling access, encapsulation, and mapping to database schemas via object-relational mappers (ORMs). Object properties enable software to express how objects relate to one another, or how an object exposes its state, in a structured and maintainable way.