Column Properties

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Last Updated: May 13, 2026
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Semaphore
Documentation

Column Properties is an abstract Concept Class used for organizational purposes. It cannot be instantiated in the model. It represents all concept classes used to deal with column properties.

Summary

Column Properties are how we model extracting a table’s values for each desired instance where those instances are arranged on distinct rows and the properties and the values are in distinct columns.

The traditional table has its instances / objects arranged per row, with their properties’ values arranged across the columns, like this:

For such a table as this, we would want to extract each fact as a row, where the properties that we want extracted are grouped together.

That is, we would want something like:

  Table fact group:
      Instance 1 fact group:
          Property 1,1 fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,2 fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,1 fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,2 fact = Value 1,M
      Instance 2 fact group:
          Property 1,M fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,M fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,1 fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,2 fact = Value 1,M
      Instance ... fact group:
          Property 1,M fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,M fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,1 fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,2 fact = Value 1,M
      Instance N fact group:
          Property 1,M fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,M fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,1 fact = Value 1,M
          Property 1,2 fact = Value 1,M

To do that, we need to use the property Table Property(s) Across Column(s) In Row(s).

It is this property that will group the instances, per row. Of course what we don’t yet know is how to identify the properties we wish to extract values for. To do that, we need to use one of three property identification strategies. We can specify the property by either its absolute position in the table, by using some anchor, or using the fact as an anchor. That is, the children of the this property are one of the following:

Column-Anchored Property
Column-Fact Property
Column-Indexed Property

Those properties have their own requirements on what needs to be modelled. The following links explain more about those.

Of course, there are also transposed tables, where the instances are arranged by columns and the instance properties on different rows like this:

The extraction of the column-based instances’ properties’ values is modelled by the Such are modelled by Table Property(s) Across Row(s) In Column(s) property.

The full list of the Concept Classes is below. Click on the links to find out mode on how to use these table fact extraction properties.

The Semaphore Fact Extraction Framework (FACTS)