Alternative Contexts

Alternative Contexts is an “Abstract” class. It cannot be used to create actual contexts in any project model – they are only here to make sense of common context types, as well as to act as organizational concept class to attribute certain properties to.

The Alternative Contexts are contexts that model a choice point in a context hierarchy. That is, the contexts immediately beneath it are contingent on what is found in the content.

An alternative context must always have other contexts (including other alternative contexts!) as its children (you cannot have fact types or anchor types.)

It should be noted that it is possible that more than one of the Alternative Contexts might extract the fact(s) – if that is the case, it is usual to create precluding associations between the alternative facts, such that the preferred one alone will ever be used to return the fact(s).

We have two different alternative types:

1. Alternative Anchors - This is a choice point for anchor children. All children must be anchors.
2. Alternative Facts - This is a choice point for fact children. All children must be facts.

We can either have alternative contexts, which are extracting contents, or we can have alternative anchors that are anchoring contexts.

Depending on which we choose, we will have differently named hierarchal relationships:

1. Alternative anchors
   1. alternative anchor
2. Alternative facts
   1. alternative fact