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Relationship Labels

What you’ll learn

Section titled “What you’ll learn”
  • Why per-population display labels exist and what they don’t change
  • How to override the default labels for one of the six relationship types
  • Where customised labels surface in the app
  • Why internal type ids stay stable across populations

Why labels are population-scoped

Section titled “Why labels are population-scoped”

Different populations carry different cetological conventions with them. A “mother-of” edge in a killer whale catalog might read more naturally as “Mother of” or “Dam of” depending on the field’s convention; harbor seal researchers might prefer “Pup of”; some teams treat “Often seen with” as “Travel companion” because that’s the framing in their published work.

The six Catalog Builder relationship types are stable across the platform — that’s what lets cross-population analyses, comparison snapshots, and the API surface keep working regardless of vocabulary choice. What’s locally customisable is the display label — the right-hand side of mother-of → “Mother of”.

Internal type (stable)Default labelWhere the label appears
mother-ofMother ofEdge tooltips, individual relationships, SNA kinship overlay legend, validation report
father-ofFather ofSame
sibling-ofSiblingSame
mate-ofMateSame
associationAssociationSame (soft type)
often-seen-withOften seen withSame (soft type)

Editing labels

Section titled “Editing labels”

Navigate to Administration > Populations > [your population] > Settings > Relationship Labels.

The page shows six rows, one per type. Each row displays:

  • The internal type id as a <code> chip — read-only, this is what API consumers, comparison snapshots, and cross-population analyses use.
  • A short helper line describing where the label renders.
  • An input field whose placeholder is the platform default. Type a value to override; leave empty to fall back to the default.

The Save action persists the overrides. Reset all to defaults clears every input field locally — you still have to press Save to commit.

What the customisation affects

Section titled “What the customisation affects”

Customised labels render wherever finwave shows the display form of a relationship:

  • Catalog Builder — edge tooltips and the relationship-type dropdown.
  • /individuals Relationships section — bucket headings (with cosmetic transformations: "Dam of" → "Dam" for the mother bucket; the plural "s" is appended for collection buckets so "Litter mate" reads as "Litter mates").
  • SNA kinship overlay legend — the colour-key strip next to the toggle.
  • SNA validation report — per-type recovery card headings (“9 / 11 in same community”).

Labels do not affect:

  • The catalog graph’s stored data — the underlying type id is what’s persisted.
  • Comparison snapshots, the SNA dispatch payload, or any worker code — internal type ids only.
  • Cross-population imports, the API, or any analytical comparison.

This separation means your customised vocabulary is purely a presentation layer: a population renaming mate-of to “Pair-bond” doesn’t break a comparison study with another population that uses the platform default. The data stays interoperable; the words don’t have to.

Plural forms in bucket headings

Section titled “Plural forms in bucket headings”

The /individuals view applies two cosmetic transforms when rendering bucket headings:

  • A trailing " of" is stripped — "Mother of" becomes "Mother" because the bucket lists the partner of that relationship, not the relationship name itself.
  • An "s" is appended for buckets that hold multiple rows (siblings, associations, often-seen-with) when the label doesn’t already end in s.

Custom labels go through the same transforms. "Litter mate" → bucket heading "Litter mates"; "Calf of" → "Calf"; "Bonded pair" → "Bonded pair" (singular bucket — no transform).

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