Glossary
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Beacon | A beacon is a reference to a particular data object in Weaviate or inside the knowledge network. This data object in turn has a position in the vector space. Often defined as follows: weaviate://{peerName}/{className}/{UUID}. (For Weaviate version < v1.14.0, it is defined as follows: weaviate://{peerName}/{UUID}.) |
| Class | A class is a definition of a semantic kind. E.g., the class Company or the class Movie. In Weaviate, classes can be recognized because they always start with an uppercase letter. |
| Concept | Concepts are related to entities. Often you will use concepts to search in your datasets. If your dataset has data about An Actor with the name Arnold Schwarzenegger and an Actor with the name Al Pacino, the concepts Movie and Terminator will find a closer relation to the first actor rather than the latter. |
| Contextionary | Derived from dictionary with context. Pre-trained vector space which contains vectors for nearly all words used in a specific language. The Contextionary (text2vec-contextionary) gives context to the language used in the dataset, inspired by the Global Vectors for Word Representation concept. Read more about the Contextionary here. |
| Entity | An entity refers to something -often- in the world around us. E.g., a Company with the name Apple refers to an entity with a relation to a Product with the name iPhone. Weaviate's Contextionary tries to find as many entities in your data as possible. |
| Fuzzy | Opposed to most other data solutions, Weaviate uses fuzzy logic to interpret a query. The upside of this is that it might find answers to queries where a traditional data solution might not. |
| HNSW | Hierarchical Navigable Small World - a multilayered graph vector index type. |
| Inverted index | An index storing a mapping from data property values, to its locations of data objects in a database (named in contrast to a forward index, which maps from data objects to property data values). |
| Property | All classes have properties. E.g., the class Company might have the property name. In Weaviate, properties can be recognized because they always have a lowercase first character. |
| Schema | In Weaviate, a schema is used to define the types of data you will be adding and querying. You can learn more about it here. |
| Weaviate Cluster | A managed Weaviate cluster |
| Weaviate Cloud Services (WCS) | WCS is our SaaS for providing cloud instances of Weaviate |
| Vector index | A data storage mechanism where data is stored as vectors (long arrays of numbers, also seen as coordinates in a high dimensional space), allowing for context-based search |
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