In Integral Relational Logic, a relation is a concise way of representing relationships, highlighting the universal class, entity (as instance of class), and attribute structure of knowledge and information, notions that have evolved from Plato’s The Republic (as universal and particular) and Aristotle’s Prior Analytics (as subject and predicate).

Here is an example of seven entities with three attributes, as instances of a class named ‘Telephone subscriber’, organized in a relation, a notion that has evolved from the relational model of data in business.

This tabular pattern is one of the principal ways in which we humans have organized and recorded our concepts since antiquity. For, instance, the first writing to be discovered on a clay tablet in Uruk (modern Erech) dates back to 3300 bce, detailing the allotment of malt to a number of people and with stock accounts of barley on the reverse.

The implicit relationships within relations form structures, which are nodes within mathematical graphs, with countless other relationships between them.

Mathematicians use matrices as another form of table, in which the attribute values are numerical, subject to the normal rules of arithmetic in linear algebra. These can also be expressed as relations in Integral Relational Logic, but there is no benefit in doing so.