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/**
 * Peregrine is an indexing engine that can recognize concepts in human readable
 * text, based on a database (thesaurus) of known terms.
 *
 * Copyright 2005-2011 Erasmus University Medical Centre (EMC)
 * Copyright 2009-2011 Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC)
 *
 * Contact us at: [email protected]
 *
 * This file is part of Peregrine. Peregrine is free software: you can
 * redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General
 * Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3
 * of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
 * ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
 * FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more
 * details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see .
 */
package org.erasmusmc.data_mining.ontology.api;

import java.io.Serializable;
import java.util.Collection;
import org.erasmusmc.data_mining.ontology.common.DatabaseId;
import org.erasmusmc.data_mining.ontology.common.DisambiguationType;

/**
 * The interface for the ontology concept.
 *
 * @author Dmitry Katsubo
 */
public interface Concept {

    /**
     * The id of this concept.
     *
     * @return the Id of the concept.
     */
    Serializable getId();

    /**
     * Returns the terms (labels) associated with this concept or an empty
     * collection if there are no terms associated with this concept.
     * 
     * For example: {@code ["Crystalline lens"@en, "Lens of Eye"@en,
     * "Eye Lens"@en, "Ocular Lens"@en].}
     *
     * @return A collection containing all labels for this concept. An empty
     * collection if there are no terms associated with this concept.
     */
    Collection getLabels();

    /**
     * Get "also known as" IDs, ie the IDs of this concept in other databases.
     *
     * @return A collection containing all known IDs to be associated with
     * this concept in other databases. An empty collection if there are no
     * other IDs known.
     */
    Collection getDatabaseIds();

    /**
     * Get the semantic types that describe the classes of concepts to which
     * this concept belongs.
     *
     * @return A collection of SemanticTypes, empty if this concept has no
     * known semantic type.
     */
    Collection getSemanticTypes();

    /**
     * Get the DisambiguationType for this concept.
     * The disambiguation type describes how this concept can be
     * disambiguated from other concepts. It can be used to choose the
     * appropriate disambiguator(s) for this concept.
     *
     * @return the disambiguation type for this concept.
     */
    DisambiguationType getDisambiguationType();
}