12.1 Alias Sets in a Lifecycle
An Alias Set in the context of a Lifecycle is a group of Aliases that make a Lifecycle portable across numerous environments. An Alias is nothing but a placeholder or a symbolic name for some actual value in a given context called an Alias Name. An Alias Value is the actual value for the Alias Name. A pair of Alias Name and Value constitutes an Alias and a group of such Aliases constitutes an Alias Set.
Imagine that a content object for a News Article was created by a content author and reviewed by a content manager. In a given department, the content author could be Mr. X and the content manager could be Ms. Y. In another department, the content authors and managers could be different persons and not necessarily Mr. X and Ms. Y.
An Alias Set comes in handy in such circumstances, helping us design an application with symbolic names for content author/manager groups, the actual values for which are resolved by the system at run time as per the current context...
