Closure

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

A closure is like a bubble in JavaScript in that it acts like a separate self-contained global scope, and can contain variables, functions, and even entire JavaScript frameworks like jQuery. Closures can have both a private and public aspect, they're in the form of a function rather than an object, and are brought into existence by calling it, what's returned is the public interface. The content of the scope within the closures definition is private and exists for as long as the returned public interface exists.

The viewer onto the unified ontology intenernally maintains a closure for each node, and many of these nodes have a visible interface aspect in the form of an associated DOM element in the page. The unified ontology viewer also allows each node to be persistent by storing them in a peer-to-peer semantic network.

See also

• Understanding closures
• The Module pattern
• JavaScript
• jQuery