Nodes and Connections

Person

_{Represents a human user interacting with the system.}

_{When to use? You want to model people's actions, permissions, or decision points.}

_{Example: A person logging into an admin dashboard, approving a workflow, or sending a secure message.}

Entity

^{Represents an organization, account, or logical grouping that owns data or enforces policy.}

^{When to use? You need access for AI agents, companies, tenants, departments, identity domains.}

^{Example: A healthcare provider, an insurance company, or a tenant account applying its own access rules.}

Thing

_{Represents a physical or virtual device.}

_{When to use? You’re modelling hardware, IoT devices, sensors, servers, or edge components.}

_{Example: A smart meter sending readings, a kiosk receiving updates, or a server reporting health status.}

Process

_{Represents a computation, workflow, or automated action.}

_{When to use? You want to show business logic, transformations, or background tasks.}

_{Example: A data validation step, a policy enforcement engine, or a message-routing workflow.}

API

_{Represents an external or internal service interface.}

_{When to use? You’re integrating with third-party services or exposing functionality programmatically.}

_{Example: A payment processor API, mapping service, or internal microservice endpoint.}

Other

^{A flexible catch-all for anything that doesn’t fit the standard categories.}

^{When to use? You need to include concepts like storage, policies, models, or abstract systems.}

^{Example: A policy store, encryption module, AI model, or logging system.}

Async Comms

_{Asynchronous, non-blocking communication where the sender doesn’t wait for a response and/or the receiver may/may not be online.}

Uses Get/Put Semantics (LINK @DARIA)

_{When to use? Really handy if you cannot guarantee both the sender/receiver will be online at the same time.}

_{Example: A device uploads data that is processed later, or a message is delivered when the recipient comes online.}

Sync Comms

_{Synchronous communication where the sender waits for an immediate response.}

Uses Get/Put Semantics (LINK @DARIA)

_{When to use? You need real-time interaction or confirmation.}

_{Example: A user request that must return a result immediately, like fetching account details.}

Notifications

_{One-way signals used to alert or inform.}

_{Uses the 'Notification' semantic}

_{When to use? You need to notify without requiring a response.}

_{Example: Push notifications, system alerts, or status updates sent to users or services.}

RPC

_{Remote Procedure Calls.}

_{Structured request/response interactions between systems.}

_{For a complex job; not sure when the other party will be online. (Particularly good for policy)}

In the SDK (colin will give me the link)

_{When to use? You want function-like calls across services with clear inputs and outputs.}

_{Example: Calling a billing service to calculate charges or a policy engine to validate access.}

Data Stream

_{Continuous or high-frequency data flow.}

Uses the stream semantic. Useful for LLM and you are not sure when it will be finished.

_{When to use? You’re handling live, ongoing data rather than discrete messages.}

_Example:

_{Telemetry feeds, sensor data, logs, or real-time analytics pipelines.}

TCP

_{Low-level, persistent network connections. Lower latency (ex: noports SSH, MCP server etc).}

_{When to use? You need full control over transport or are modeling underlying network behavior.}

_Example:

_{A custom protocol, legacy integration, or long-lived secure connection.}