Lenses

A lens is a saved way of reading a world: which elements, how far from a starting set, how much of each. It is a Construct with supertype Lens, defined by the lens profile. A lens only narrows: it reads inside what the reader may already see, never more.

A world

its elements, and the links between them

read through

A lens

what to read of the world

• where it starts
• how far it reaches
• which categories it keeps
• how much of each

Read for whoever holds it: each reader sees only what they may.

drawn as

A picture

a graph, a map, a list or a walk

An address

says where a thing is. It can also name a lens and the moment to read it at, so a link opens a reading.

https://www.onlyworlds.com/w/<world id>/<type>/<id>@<step>?lens=<id>

The world holds the elements; a lens chooses which of them to read, for whoever holds it; a picture draws that reading; an address says where it all is, and can carry the lens in a link.

What every reader does

• The anchors are the lens’s own links (its characters, locations, institutions and the rest), and nothing else. A lens that links other lenses through constructs is an umbrella of them; titles names the Titles it is the default for.
• The recipe sits in one extension field, x_lens: depth (0 the anchors only, 1 also what links to or from them, the default), types, a window back from the reading’s date (window, or from and to), undated, changed_within (days back from the reading’s own clock, read on each element’s updated_at: what a hop reaches that changed longer ago is cut as stale; never an anchor), show (full, first_line, name), budget (1 to 1000, default 50), mail and notes (a sentence per anchor). A value outside the profile’s table makes the lens unreadable, the key named.
• A template is a lens with subtype Template and no anchors: it reads nothing until it is copied into a world and pointed at that world’s things.
• Reading one: visibility comes first (a hidden or proposed element is not there to hop through), a hop reaches both ways, a Relation is crossed as an edge, a hop never crosses into or out of the room, and a date compares at the precision it states. The world’s reading aids (its Charter, Guide and Domains: the pair and the mark x_charter_of) are kept only when types names their pair (law/charter, construct/guide, construct/domain), and a hop goes no further through one that is not; an anchor that is a reading aid is kept and followed like any anchor. What the budget or a rule leaves out is counted by reason, never dropped silently.

The TypeScript and Python SDKs read a lens over a world snapshot (resolveLens, resolve_lens).

On onlyworlds.com

On onlyworlds.com, a world’s Lenses page (/account/worlds/<world id>/lenses, in the world’s menu) lists its lenses, changes one and shows its reading; the owner can read it as another reader. Its Start from finds elements by a word, the most linked first (by the graph’s degree, for the reader the page reads as), and offers a world’s Domains as packages of starting points, or a few proposed ones in a world with no Domain; nothing is stored until you save the lens. Its Library holds the public templates and the world’s own, each copied in with its settings and no starting points; a lens can be copied to another of your worlds, or published as a template without its starting points or their notes. On your own lens the page reads it a second time in the browser with the SDK’s resolveLens and says whether the two readings agree.

The routes that serve lenses are on Lenses on the API.