neighbourhood-language

What is neighbourhood-language and what is it for?

neighbourhood-language is a pluggable module — an AD4M "Language" — that defines how a shared semantic graph, or Neighbourhood, is stored and published inside Coasys's AD4M framework. It exists so a group's shared space can be given an address that people and apps can look up and join, without the app on top needing to know how the space itself is stored.

neighbourhood-language is one of the early modules built for AD4M, the framework Coasys describes as extending Holochain's agent-centric architecture into an interoperability layer for apps and networks. In AD4M a module of this kind is called a Language, and this one concerns Perspectives: the repository's own package description calls it "a Language about Perspectives - a way to share Perspectives and create social and collaboration contexts". Its stated purpose was to give a shared space a store and an address.

A Perspective is one agent's private web of associations; a Neighbourhood is the shared version a group keeps in sync. This module provides the record that names a Neighbourhood and, in the design Coasys documents, makes it reachable through a neighbourhood:// address carrying the address of the link language that forms the space. That lets someone look up a group by its identifier and obtain the module needed to reach the group's data, while the app on top stays unchanged.

As code, the module is a small adapter: it signs a record and writes it to storage, then reads it back by its content address. A later revision moved that storage from a Holochain DNA to IPFS, with the DNA calls left commented out. Public activity on the repository stopped in 2022, so it is best read as a historical part of AD4M rather than a current one; the repository itself and the Coasys whitepaper are where to look next.

From 7 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.