Inspecting — Portraits & Passports
JinDesk has two “inspect this” surfaces, and they answer genuinely different questions. Knowing which is which is the whole skill:
A Portrait inspects an instance — one thing in the data. “Who is this one, and what did it record?”
A Passport inspects a definition — a column, a type, or a term. “What is this field, and what does the platform know about it?”
Portrait : the data (an instance) :: Passport : the metadata (a definition).
The test, when you’re unsure: am I looking at a row or at a column? A row — a station, a parcel, a material, a case — gets a Portrait. A column, a marked term, or a type — gets a Passport.
The Portrait — a likeness of one subject
Section titled “The Portrait — a likeness of one subject”A Portrait is the inspection surface for a focused entity instance. You open it by focusing a thing — clicking a map feature, a scatter point, a table row — and it shows that one subject’s record: its values, and a doorway to its evidence.
- Its subject is always a specific
business_id— this station, this parcel — never a kind of thing. - It is driven by the Focus track: zero or one subject under inspection at a time. Focusing opens the Portrait; clearing focus closes it.
- Canonical example — the Station Portrait. Click a station on a map and its co-located measurement streams open in place, each expandable from the overview down to the evidence in a single move.
Mnemonic: a portrait is of someone — a likeness of one particular subject.
The Passport — the papers of a column or term
Section titled “The Passport — the papers of a column or term”A Passport is the inspection surface for a declaration — everything the platform knows about a field or a term, at the point of use.
- Canonical example — the Column Passport. Open it on a column header (a
deliberate click or keyboard header-dive; hover-preview is
config-gated). It assembles, from what
jin makealready baked:- the semantic type — kind, subkind
- its unit and standard (the Codex authority — full name, publisher, jurisdiction)
- how it rolls up a hierarchy (its
rolluppolicy) - where it was derived from (the refinement chain)
- its resolved display config (precision, format, render-unit)
- or, honestly, an “un-refined” state when nothing is declared — with a path to fix it.
- Sibling — the Term Passport. A marked glossary term shows its definition and owning vocabulary at the point it’s used (the Marked Language).
- Its subject is a kind of thing, never an instance:
unit_pricethe column, not the price in row 12.
Mnemonic: a passport is a document that certifies what something is — its type, its provenance, its papers.
They can meet on one click
Section titled “They can meet on one click”Clicking a cell can offer both — the row’s Portrait (“show me this whole
material”) and the column’s Passport (“what is this unit_price field?”) —
because “which one is this?” is not “what is this?”. A surface that tried to
be both would be legible as neither, which is why the two are kept apart.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”| Portrait | Passport | |
|---|---|---|
| subject | an instance (a row) | a definition (a column / term / type) |
| question | who is this one? what did it record? | what is this field? what’s known about it? |
| opened by | focusing a feature / point / row | inspecting a column header / marked term |
| driven by | the Focus track (0..1) | the Typology + Codex |
| keyed on | a business_id | a column name / term |
| canonical | the Station Portrait | the Column Passport |
See also
Section titled “See also”- Typology Reference — the types a Passport reports
- Sense 54 — The Typology · Sense 53 — The Codex
- JinDesk Guide — the pages these surfaces live on
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