view of the database is the 34 father child 34 view of the database while a different hierarchical view of the same database is the 34 mother child 34 view in this example the parameter may designate which biological parent is of interest the second function returns either the parent node children nodes or no nodes if no nodes are returned the node supplied to the second function has no nodes fitting the query requested i e no parent or child exists fig4 is a flowchart of how followrelation might be implemented the function receives the node and parameters 410 the function then generates a query 420 and accesses the results 430 from the results the function returns the parent or the children of the node 440 and this information is returned to the user 450 an example of the interface to followrelation is given below another function supplies more information about a specific node for illustrative purposes this function is named getnodeattributeso the information that is returned is a data structure containing the attributes or values for the specified node the attributes or values may also contain an aggregation of information about the children of the node fig5 is an example of how this function might be implemented the parameters designating the node and the information requested from the node is supplied to the function 510 the function then determines if a query is needed 520 the reason a query may not be needed is because the information desired has already been accessed by a previous call.