Cloud CMS has the notion of both directed and undirected associations. In the API and within the drivers, when you work with associations, you can query for associations that are "incoming" or "outgoing":
- These are both directed associations which are relative to a given node. Outgoing means start from this node and find associations pointing to another node. Incoming means find associations that point to me.
- It also supports the notion of "mutual" associations which are undirected. The source or target information is treated identical and you get back associations in which your node plays a role as either the association.
From a programmatic perspective, any associations between two nodes in the content graph retain valuable information. If you were building a web site and wanted to pull back relationships from a node within the graph, you have a lot of power at your disposal.
Currently, relator properties effectively store relationship information in a "source" node about it's relationship to a target node. Since the relator property is modeled on the source, it describes a change to the schema on the source. It doesn't describe anything about the target (i.e. the target node doesn't receive any JSON-impacting or property-level information about it's relationship back to the source).