Question

I have a problem naming the elements in my application’s data model.

In the application, the user has the possibility to create his own metamodel. He does so by creating entity types and a type defines which properties an entity has. However, there are three kinds of entity types:

1. There is always exactly one instance of the type.
   For instance, I want to model the company I am working for. It has a name, a share price and a number of employees. These values change over time, but there is always exactly one company.
2. There are different instances of the type, each is unique.
   Example: Cities. A city has a name and a population count, there are different cities and each city exists exactly once.
3. Each instance of the type defines multiple entities.
   Example: Cars. A car has a color and a manufacturer. But there is not only one red mercedes. And even though they are similar, red mercedes #1 is different from red mercedes #2.

So lets say you are a user of this tool and you understood the concept of these three flavors. You want to create a new entity type and are prompted to choose between option 1, 2 and 3. How would you name these options?

Edit:
Documentation and help is available to the user. Also the user can be expecteted to have a technical/programming background, so understanding these three concepts should be no problem.

Answer 1

First of all let me make sure I understand the problem,
Here’s what you have (correct me if I’m wrong):

#of instances , is/are Unique

(1,true)
(n,true)
(n,false)

If so,
for #of instances I would use single \ plural
for is\are unique (\ not unique) I would use unique \ ununique.

so you’ll get:

singleUnique
pluralUnique
pluralUnunique

That’s the best I could think of.. I don’t know exactly who are your users and what is the environment, But if you have an option of adding tips (or documentation) that should be used for sure.