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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;

/**
 * The interface for the ontology term.
 *
 * @author Dmitry Katsubo
 */
public interface Term extends Label {

    /**
     * The interface for the Term.Id.
     */
    interface Id extends Serializable {

        /**
         * Get the identifier of the concept that is linked to this term.
         * @return the concept identifier.
         */
        Serializable getConceptId();
    }

    /**
     * Get the identief of the parent concept.
     *
     * @return The identifier of the parent concept.
     */
    Id getId();

    /**
     * Get the case-sensitivity flag for matching of the term. This defines if
     * the term should be matched with a case-sensitive or not case-sensitive
     * matcher.
     * 
     * Case sensitive means that two words that differ only in the case of the
     * letters are not consider the same term.
     *
     * @return The state of the CaseInsensitive flag. True means that the term
     * is NOT case-sensitive, false (the default) means that the term IS
     * case-sensitive.
     */
    boolean isCaseInsensitive();

    /**
     * Get the order-sensitivity flag for matching of the term. This defines
     * whether the order of the words of the term is important.
     * 

     * Order sensitive means that two sequences of words that consist of only
     * the same word, but that are not in the same order are not considered the
     * same term.
     *
     * @return The state of the OrderSensitive flag. The default value is false
     * (the order of terms is not important).
     */
    boolean isOrderSensitive();

    /**
     * Get the nomalisation flag for matching of the term. This defines whether
     * the term must be normalised before matching.
     * 
     * Normalisation is the process of reducing the word to its stem.
     *
     * @return The state of the normalized flag. The default value is false
     * (the term should not be normalized).
     */
    boolean isNormalized();
}