Step 5 — Following a Relationship Across the Set¶
Moving a whole group¶
So far we have been filtering: keeping the same entities but showing more or fewer of them. Now we will do something different — we will move the entire set through a relationship to arrive at a completely new group of entities.
This is called set-to-set traversal, and it is one of the most powerful ideas in Moire. Instead of clicking on one researcher and following their affiliation individually, you tell Moire: "take all six researchers simultaneously, follow the affiliatedWith relationship for every one of them, and show me the union of everything they are affiliated with." The input is a set of people; the output is a set of institutions.
Using the Jump via strip¶
Make sure you are looking at all six researchers with no filters active. At the bottom of the cards area you will see the Jump via strip — a row of small buttons:
- affiliatedWith (→ 3)
- locatedIn (→ 3)
- worksOn (→ 2)
The number in parentheses tells you how many distinct entities the current set connects to via that relationship. affiliatedWith (→ 3) means the six researchers collectively are affiliated with three distinct universities.
Click locatedIn (→ 3).
What just happened¶
The entity cards change entirely. You now see three city cards: Oslo, Uppsala, Stockholm. The facet sidebar has updated to reflect city properties rather than researcher properties. The context header reads: "Locations of Researchers".
You have not lost the researchers — they are still in Moire's navigation history. But the current set is now the cities that those researchers are located in. You moved the group through a relationship and landed somewhere new.
This is the crucial difference between set-to-set traversal and clicking on a single entity:
- When you click a researcher card, you navigate to that one researcher. The result is one person in detail.
- When you click locatedIn in the Jump via strip, you navigate from all six researchers to all their locations simultaneously. The result is a new set — in this case, three cities.
The Relationships Browser¶
The Jump via strip shows only the most traversal-useful relationships — the three or four with IRI-valued objects and the broadest coverage. To see the full picture of every relationship available on the current set, click Browse relationships → from the researchers set (click Back first to return to the researchers, then click Browse relationships →).
The Relationships Browser opens and shows a table:
Outgoing relationships (from researchers to other entities):
| Relationship | Subjects | Targets | |
|---|---|---|---|
| affiliatedWith | 6 researchers | → 3 universities | Follow as set → |
| locatedIn | 6 researchers | → 3 cities | Follow as set → |
| worksOn | 2 researchers | → 2 projects | Follow as set → |
| leads | 3 researchers | → 3 groups | Follow as set → |
| coAuthorOf | 1 researcher | → 1 researcher | Follow as set → |
| knows | 1 researcher | → 1 researcher | Follow as set → |
Literal-valued relationships (values that work better as filters):
| Relationship | Subjects | Values | |
|---|---|---|---|
| nationality | 6 researchers | 5 distinct nationalities | Add as facet |
| gender | 6 researchers | 2 values | Add as facet |
The Follow as set → buttons are for IRI-valued relationships — those that connect to other entities you can navigate into. The Add as facet option is for literal values (text, numbers) that work better as filters than as navigation targets.
Click Follow as set → next to affiliatedWith. The set becomes the three universities: University of Oslo, Uppsala University, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Context header: "Affiliations of Researchers".
Follow as set vs Add as facet
Use Follow as set when you want to visit the connected entities — to see them as cards, read their details, and navigate further from them. Use Add as facet when you want to filter by those values while staying with the current entities. Adding nationality as a facet keeps you with the researchers but lets you filter by national origin. Following affiliatedWith as a set takes you to the universities themselves.
What to do¶
From the universities set, continue to Step 6 to see what happens when you traverse again.