familydepends

Familydepends is a term used in information science and data modeling to describe a class of dependencies that are activated by or contingent upon family relationships within a dataset. The term blends family and dependency to convey that access, constraints, or behaviors may differ depending on kinship ties.

In a familydepends model, nodes represent entities such as individuals, documents, or resources, and edges encode family ties. Dependencies are conditional: a resource may depend on another only if the requester belongs to the same family unit or a specified kin category. This allows inheritance of permissions, obligations, or data visibility to follow a family structure rather than a flat user namespace. The concept helps formalize how rules and behaviors cascade along family lines, supporting scenarios where lineage or guardianship influences access and control.

Applications include privacy and access control in family-centric systems, inheritance of digital assets, or governance of data in family-owned enterprises. It can assist in modeling situations where rules apply to generations, such as guardianship, succession, or caregiving obligations, ensuring that related individuals receive appropriate rights or obligations without broad propagation beyond the family.

Implementation notes: familydepends relationships can be represented with directed graphs or rule-based systems. A simple rule might be: if x is a descendant of y, then y's consent requirement is inherited by x. Technologies like graph databases, Datalog, or SPARQL can express such rules, with privacy and consent constraints encoded as predicates. Limitations include potential ambiguity in defining kinship and family scope; clear definitions of generation rules and scope are necessary.

See also: family tree, inheritance law, access control, dependency graph.