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list attributes using r.listAttr(my_uuid)
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get a specific attribute using r.getAttr(my_uuid, attribute)
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set a specific attribute to a specific value using r.getAttr(my_uuid, attribute, value)
This is great once you've found the UUID of the u-form you're interested in, but clearly, there need to be ways of finding these UUIDs, based on the name attribute of a u-form playing the Role for Entity, the latitude and longitude of a u-form playing the Role for Geo-Reference, or any number of other possble values for different attribtues. This is where indexes come into play.
Indexes for the Information Commons, and the Universal Database in general, are created using other u-forms. This is obviously desirable, because it means that indexes can be distributed, replicated, and shepherded just like any other u-forms. Part of MAYA Design's most innovative research over recent years has been in the development of indexing structures that work successfully in the peer-to-peer world. The successful solutions to this challenge have, by and large, involved adapting well-known index structures to the peer-to-peer environment, and seeing how well they work. The versions that have proved most successful are now used to enable uesrs to search and navigate information in the Geobrowser, and code for building and querying these index structures is released as part of the Python API.
These include modules for:
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String Indexes (and more generally, indexes for any totally ordered set)
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Spatial Indexes (and more generally, indexes for any vector-valued data)
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Hierarchical Indexes (this gives documentation for a data structure that is largely deprecated, but you may still need to be able to read from)
