The colon notation expresses a parent-child relationship or, in notation form, parent::child. It is a quick way to define multiple components and their relationships from a single column.

As an example, examine the following table:

Once imported, it forms the following relationships:

The key detail to note is that it is the children components that have the reference created between them:

As an example, we'll use the following table of Capabilities and Applications:

Capabilities and Applications are defined using the double-colon notation and specify that a capability has sub-capabilities and that individual applications are children to an application category type.

Instead of mapping these components separately in another sheet and establishing a Custom ID-based relationship mapping, we'll create components and establish relationships directly from this single sheet.

We'll start by defining the worksheet as a references worksheet and by creating a source and target workspace:

Then we'll set the Capability column to the Source column type with the following configuration:

Similarly, we'll set the Applications column to the Target column type with the following configuration:

Finally, we'll set the Type column to the Type column type.

We'll then review our import and import our data, then look at our workspace:

You will notice that the relationships we defined with the double-colon notation are indeed replicated when imported into Ardoq (if a bit hard to see in the web of references). Specifically: