Interface that encapsulates an individual in an ontology, sometimes referred to as a fact or assertion, or a member of the a-box. In order to be recognised as an individual, rather than a generic resource, at least one rdf:type
statement, referring to a known class, must be present in the model.
In general Individuals are immutable. That is, once they are created their genetic material should not be modified. This protocol helps insure that they are safe to read under multithreaded conditions. You can violate this protocol, but try to do so when you know you have only have a single thread.
In addition to serialization for checkpointing, Individuals may read and write themselves to streams in three ways.
Since individuals should be largely immutable, why is there a readIndividual method? after all this method doesn't create a new individual -- it just erases the existing one. This is largely historical; but the method is used underneath by the various newIndividual methods in Species, which do create new individuals read from files. If you're trying to create a brand new individual read from a file, look in Species.
Individuals are Comparable: if you sort Individuals, the FITTER individuals will appear EARLIER in a list or array. @author Sean Luke @version 1.0
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