Entity Types and Roles

Entity Types

Entity Types define particular classes of entities that can be added to your timeline. Available entity types vary based on template, but may typically include types such as Person, Location, Project, Story Arc, Character, Client, or Company.
Entity Types are important, as they can be used to divide your timeline into different groups (e.g. you can group events by Project or Employee).
You can add new and edit existing entity types in the Settings. Tap on Add new entity type to add a new entity type, or click on an existing to edit or delete.

For each entity type, you can specify the following information:
Name: A unique name used for the entity type
Icon: The icon used to represent entities of this type in Relationship View
Allow start/end events and age calculations: Whether this entity type should be allowed to have birth and death events, and therefore be able to calculate entity ages.

Generally speaking, you would only allow start/end events for entity types if you want Aeon Timeline to calculate entity ages for you. This is very useful for fiction or historical timelines, but may not be very useful for Project Management or Legal timelines.

Roles

Each entity type is able to fill one or more roles for an event. A few examples to illustrate this include:
  • An employee may be able to fill different roles such as “Project Lead”, “Developer”, and “Reviewer”.
  • A character in a novel may fill a role of “Participant” in an event or “Witness” to an event.
Every entity type must have at least one role, but are allowed to have more than one. For each role, you can set the following:
Name: The name of the role. This must be unique across all names in your template (including entity type names, roles in other types, and property names). The one exception to this is that one role may share the same name as its owning entity type (e.g. an entity type called “Story Arc” can have a role called “Story Arc”).
Icon: The icon used for this role in the intersection of entities and events in the Relationship View
Allow multiple per event: Whether an event can have multiple entities fulfilling a role, or whether it can only have a single value. For example, an event may be allowed to be allocated to a single project only, but it may have multiple people working on it.

When to add a new type vs when to add a new role

This depends on your individual circumstance and what you are trying to achieve, but as a general rule of thumb:
  • If the same entity may perform different roles for different events, then you should add a new role to that entity type
  • If no existing entity or entity type will ever fill a role, then it would make sense to create a new Entity Type.
As an example, if an employee may sometimes act as a Manager and sometimes as a Developer, depending on the event, they should be different roles.

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