Hierarchy Open Service Interface Definition
Encyclopedia
The Hierarchy Open Service Interface Definition (OSID) is an Open Knowledge Initiative
Open Knowledge Initiative
The Open Knowledge Initiative is an organization responsible for the specification of software interfaces comprising a Service Oriented Architecture based on high level service definitions.-Description:...

 specification. OSIDs are programmatic interfaces which comprise a Service Oriented Architecture for designing and building reusable
Reusability
In computer science and software engineering, reusability is the likelihood a segment of source code that can be used again to add new functionalities with slight or no modification...

 and interoperable software.

The Hierarchy OSID which provides a means of creating and traversing hierarchical structures of various types. These types include trees
Tree (data structure)
In computer science, a tree is a widely-used data structure that emulates a hierarchical tree structure with a set of linked nodes.Mathematically, it is an ordered directed tree, more specifically an arborescence: an acyclic connected graph where each node has zero or more children nodes and at...

, forests, directed graph
Directed graph
A directed graph or digraph is a pair G= of:* a set V, whose elements are called vertices or nodes,...

s with multiple parents, and directed acyclic graph
Directed acyclic graph
In mathematics and computer science, a directed acyclic graph , is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it is formed by a collection of vertices and directed edges, each edge connecting one vertex to another, such that there is no way to start at some vertex v and follow a sequence of...

s.

Many collections of data used throughout software systems are organized into hierarchies. Examples are management organizations, file systems, course structures, etc. The Hierarchy OSID creates a common tools for viewing and maintaining this type of structure. While these data collections have rich structures themselves, the Hierarchy OSID is concerned only with the hierarchical relationship among nodes and not what the nodes represent. It manages the structure, not the data.
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