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Open Context Concepts and Data Organization
Projects represent a unit of publication. They are mostly discrete, but sometimes cross reference certain entities across different projects.
The "Open Context Project" the (ID is project_uuid = '0', and we might want to refactor this so that we're consistently referencing a common constant) is REQUIRED for every instance of Open Context. The Open Context project contains entities that are referenced by all other projects that may be published. For instance, certain geographic entities (like US states or countries across the world) belong to the Open Context project. A project contributed by team of researchers will have new entities that will be contained within geographic entities owned by the Open Context project. There are also some descriptive predicates and entities owned by the Open Context project that are similarly used by other projects contributed by other research teams.
These are two similarly structured models used to describe entities (and their relationships) in Open Context. The main distinction is that the Assertion model describes entities mainly using the terms / attributes provided by data authors. These will typically vary widely from project to project. On the other hand, the LinkAnnotation model is used mainly by Open Context editors to relate entities (especially controlled vocabulary terms) to more broadly used community / expert curated data / terms found elsewhere on the Web. For example, the LinkAnnotation model often has data that may say that the term "sheep" in a given project dataset is a "skos:closeMatch" with "http://eol.org/pages/311906".