Entities – Page 2 – Lucid Help

Applies to Matrix key projects

Items are added to the Features and Entities trees in one of two ways. Either via:

The context pop-up menu, when the Features or Entities panel is right clicked.
Or by main menu Tools…Add Features|Add Entities. The menu option depends on which panel (Features or Entities) has focus.

Adding items using the context pop-up menu

Right click in the Features or Entities panel to open the context pop-up menu. If you click with an empty area of the panel then the context menu will only offer Add options for adding a new Feature or Entity. If however, you have an existing Feature or Entity then right clicking on one of these will add additional options to the context menu such as adding a new Feature or Entity as a Sibling or Parent.

Features – Add Options

Add Feature – will add a new Feature to the root of the Feature tree. The position of the new Feature will be below the currently selected Feature (if one exists).

Add Feature as Child – This option will only be available if at least one Feature already exists in the Features Panel. The newly created Feature will be added to the currently selected Feature, if the Feature does not have any states. In other words the selected Feature can become a Grouping Feature. The Lucid Builder will enforce tree building rules to prevent any issues with the mismatching options. See the note below for further details on this.

Add Feature as Parent – This option will add a new Feature as a parent of the currently selected Feature.

Add State – The Add State option is only available to non-grouping Features and non-numeric Features. Adding one or more States to a Feature turns the Feature into a Multi-State Feature. A Feature State is indicated by a blue diamond icon () to the left of its label.

Entities – Add Options

Add Entity – will add a new Entity to the root of the Entities tree. The position of the new Entity will be below the currently selected Entity (if one exists).

Add Entity as Child – This option will only be available if at least one Entity already exists in the Entities Panel. The newly created Entity will be added to the currently selected Entity, if the Entity does not have any specimens. In other words the selected Entity can become a Grouping Entity. The Lucid Builder will enforce tree building rules to prevent any issues with the mismatching options. See the note below for further details on this.

Add Entity as Parent – This option will add a new Entity as a parent of the currently selected Entity.

Add Specimen – Adds a Specimen Entity as a child of the selected Entity. Specimen Entities can only be added where the parent entity isn’t a Grouping Entity. That is they can only be ‘leaves’ of the Entity tree. See here for more information on Specimen Entities.

Adding items using main menu Tools…Import Features | Entities

The ‘Add Features’ or ‘Add Entities’ option (depending on which tree panel is selected) allows you to quickly add multiple items (or even just one item).

Import Features

The ‘Import Features’ dialog allows you to quickly add multiple Features and States to the Feature tree. Each line within the text area represents a Feature or State. You can represent the Feature tree by using tabs. For example, a Feature entered without a preceding tab would be added as a root element within the Feature tree. While an item added with a preceding tab would be added as state, unless it has child items (represented by an additional tab). Below shows an example Feature set ready for adding:

Lucid Builder Add Features dialog text example

Import mode: Append to tree

The text block of Features and/or States to be imported will be processed and then added to the end of the existing Feature tree. If an element already exists with the same label then the newly imported element will be renamed by appending a count number to keep the same level elements labels unique.

Import Mode: Merge with tree

Rather than just appending the text block of Features and/or States to the end of the existing Feature tree as with the ‘Append to tree’ option, the merge option will look for matching structure and element labels and merge any new elements into the existing tree structure. If no matching structure or elements are found then the text block items will be appended to the end of the tree.

Import Entities

The ‘Import Entities‘ dialog allows you to quickly add multiple Entities to the Entities tree. For the ‘Add Entities’ option to be available in the Tools menu the ‘Entities Panel’ must have focus. Each line within the text area of the dialog represents an Entity. You can represent a tree structure of Entities by using tabs.

Import mode: Append to tree

The text block of Entities to be imported will be processed and then added to the end of the existing Entity tree. If an element already exists with the same label then the newly imported element will be renamed by appending a count number to keep the same level elements labels unique.

Import Mode: Merge with tree

Rather than just appending the text block of Entities to the end of the existing Entities tree as with the ‘Append to tree’ option, the merge option will look for matching structure and element labels and merge any new elements into the existing tree structure. If no matching structure or elements are found then the text block items will be appended to the end of the tree.

Note

There are built-in rules within the Lucid Builder to prevent you from adding items into logically inappropriate places. For example, if the currently selected item in the Features tree is a state, you will be unable to choose the Add as Child or Add as Parent options, as states may not have children and any state already has a parent. Similarly, if the currently selected item is a feature that already has states, you will not be able to select the Add as Child option if the Add Feature button is selected, since a feature that has states as children may not also have a feature as a child.

Entities in Lucid are the things the key aims to identify. Depending on the scope of the key, the entities may be different kinds of things. For example, in a key to the palms of Brazil, the Entities will be species of palms, in a key to the families of flies of the world the entities will be fly families, in a key to minerals the Entities will be types of minerals, in a key to disorders of sweet potatoes the Entities will be the causes of disorders found in sweet potatoes.

In Lucid we use the term Entity because it applies to all the animals, plants, other organisms, human artifacts, or other possible things that a key may be designed to help identify. Lucid itself doesn’t know whether the Entities are species of plants, families of flies, minerals or diseases – they are all simply Entities to Lucid, and are all handled in the same way.

Specimen Entities are ‘sub’ Entities and used to track individual data associated with the parent Entity. For example, specimen entities can represent real world specimens and track their features, via scoring. This data is then combined to form the data of the parent Entity. Imagine you were studying a new species of plant and wanted to record the details of several specimens. Each would be added as an Entity specimen and if we had a numeric feature for leaf length we could record this data. The leaf length feature values for each specimen would be combined to form the parent entity’s leaf length numeric scoring range.

Features in Lucid are characteristics of the Entities in the key that can be used to describe each Entity.

For example, in a key to minerals one feature may be the types of crystalline form shown by the mineral. Of the minerals in the key, there will be a number of different crystal forms – such as cubic, tetragonal etc. The different possibilities for crystal form are called States of the Feature. States of a Feature are indicated in the Lucid Builder by blue diamonds preceding the State names.

In Lucid there are three main types of features.

Multi-state Features have two or more alternative states.

Numeric Features, by contrast, are ones in which real numbers (integer or decimal) are used to describe the Entities. Numeric Features are normally used for lengths, widths, ratios and counts. For example, a key to butterflies may use a numeric Feature for the length of the forewing, or for the number of segments in the antennae.

Grouping Features are Features that contain other Features. Grouping Features can be converted to numeric Features via the Items property window and vice versa.