Imagine a student in Tizi Ouzou builds a small database of Kabyle proverbs. Each proverb has a text, a translation, a theme, maybe a region where it’s commonly heard. She doesn’t study database design. She just describes what she knows: this proverb has these properties.
Now imagine a researcher in Osaka is cataloguing yōkai folklore. Different language, different domain, same gesture: objects with properties.
Neither of them should need to design a schema, choose a table layout, learn SQL, or ask permission from a specification committee. They describe what they have. The properties speak for themselves.
Exwen is a proposal for property-centric data management.
SQL organizes data around tables — rigid containers that decide in advance what shape your data must take. An object exists because it belongs to a table. Its properties are columns, fixed at creation time.
This gets the practice backwards. We come to understanding through sens first, then words, then properties, then eventually objects.
s(ens) → wor[l]ds → proper[ties] → obj[ect…]s
We don’t start with the container and fill it — we start with meaning
and let form follow. A proverb is a proverb because it carries wisdom
and has a text, not because someone created a proverbs
table first. A person is not a row in users.
The table-centric model forces you to know the shape of your data before you understand it. Exwen starts where you start: with meaning.
In exwen, objects exist. They have properties. Each property has a definition — possibly multiple definitions across different contexts and communities.
An object is not typed by its table. An object becomes
comprehensible through the properties it carries. If something has
text, translation, and region,
you can work with it — whether you call it a proverb, a lexical entry,
or something else entirely.
Systems discover what objects are by examining what properties they have. When an object matches a predicate — a pattern of properties — it becomes usable in a given context.
Others have explored parts of this territory. Exwen draws on that work and proposes a coherent foundation: the property is the primary unit of data modelling.
Properties can have multiple definitions. In a well-established domain, communities may converge on consistent usage — not because a standards body enforced it, but because good definitions are comprehensible.
But convergence is not the goal. A geocities page built with
<center><bold> told stories too. Algospeak,
mezangelle, improvised markup — these are not anti-patterns. They are
how people actually express themselves when given a surface to work
with.
Exwen does not punish divergence. What it does is keep things connected. However you name your properties, however strange your structure, your data is still reachable, still queryable, still part of the graph. The well-named properties are easier to find. The eccentric ones still tell their story.
Humans, obviously. But also: language models, agents, scripts, browsers.
A property-centric store is inherently more accessible to diverse clients than a table-centric one. An LLM doesn’t need to reverse-engineer a schema. It asks: what properties does this object have? And works from there. A lightweight browser — one that doesn’t run arbitrary JavaScript but instead queries structured data — can navigate property-centric stores directly.
This is why exwen matters beyond database theory. It’s the layer that turns opaque storage into legible, queryable, navigable data — for anyone, in any language, with any tool.
Exwen is not a database. It is a view on data — a way of organizing access to what’s stored underneath.
Below exwen sits an ordered key-value store (okvs): silent, opaque, mathematically grounded, indifferent to the shape of what it holds.
Above exwen sit the tools people use: functions that transform and query properties, browsers that navigate them, agents that reason over them.
Exwen is the middle layer that makes storage speak.
This is for anyone who has ever felt that their data didn’t fit the boxes they were given. For the student in Tizi Ouzou, the researcher in Osaka, the developer in São Paulo who wants to describe what they know in terms that make sense to them — and have that description be enough.
Exwen is part of the Möbius project.
This letter was written in collaboration with Claude.
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