DOCUMENTATION
Data Channels
A linking path that collects live sources into one user’s local ghost.
A is how a collects live sources into a channel of data associated with one user’s ghost in a local service.
The picture in the source is ordinary. You create a service that wants temperature. Several makers already offer temperature services. You link to them. Each sensor updates its own ghost. For a given person, the readings that belong to that person gather in the data channel of their primary ghost in your service.
What has to be true before anything arrives
Linking is not enough. The path can be long. Each node only works on local structures. How a value was morphed is unknown outside that service.
Data is consumed at an endpoint when the ghosts at the ends are owned by the same user, or the receiver has approved read access. Only data with a valid morphed ghost is received.
Same user usually means one person and two of their endpoints. It does not mean two different people become one person because they share an implementation. Two people do not open each other’s readings by default. One of them morphs (read) or transfers (ownership).
When a service owner morphs a user’s ghost into a primary service, the data collected for that user is available in that user’s channel on the local service. The user has a presence at both ends of the value chain. The endpoint that is bijectively connected to those ghosts can consume the result.
The channel is personal
Two people can use the same service address and not receive the same values. Each listens through their own ghosts. The local model can be shared. The origin is not.
That is how the architecture avoids a central dump that every client polls. The network does not natively store the channel. A service may persist what it has been granted, in the local shape it understands. That is optional and local.
If nobody is listening, the value does not need to travel. That is a different cost from a store that answers whether or not the reading changed.
Several sources, one local shape
A channel can gather more than one maker. The receiving service still has one local model. Each incoming source is morphed to fit that model. A sensor that reports in one unit does not force every other service to change. The does the fit. If the service then changes the value after absorb, that is a .
The owner of the original source can withdraw a morph. That source goes dark in the secondary channel. Other sources on the same channel can keep arriving. The primary home of the withdrawn source keeps working.
What a channel is not
It is not a public firehose. It is not a search inbox of stored events. It is not a chat room.
It is a live path, for a user who owns or has been granted the ends, into a local ghost whose service has described its own shape.
See Morphic services for primary and secondary homes, or What it can do for the temperature and room stories.