objectsindividual

Objectsindividual is a term used in some technical contexts to denote a single, concrete instance of an object within a model, data store, or programming environment. It is closely related to the concept of an individual or instance in knowledge representation and to the notion of an object in object-oriented programming. While a class or type defines a set of possible objects, an objectsindividual represents an actual entity that exists or is created during execution or in data.

In programming, an object is an instance of a class; the term objectsindividual may be used to stress the difference between the class (the template) and the particular runtime object (the instantiated entity). In ontology and semantic web contexts, individuals (often called instances) are the referents of named resources that participate in relations and carry data values through properties. An individual is asserted to be of a class, and can be linked to other individuals via object properties and to literals via data properties.

Example: In a product catalog, the class Product has an individual 'Product-AXB-123' which is an objectsindividual of Product with properties such as hasPrice = 199.99 and hasCategory = Electronics.

Tools and standards such as OWL, RDF, and SPARQL support representing and querying individuals, enabling reasoning about identity, consistency, and inferred relationships.

See also: class, property, ontology, OWL, RDF, instance, object-oriented programming.