A technical explanation of the core concepts can be found in the The Data Engine (c2vi Diploma Thesis) chapter of my Diploma Thesis. This note aims to be less technical.
This is an extremely hard thing to explain. Let’s start with the “Everything is an Item”. This is inspired from Everything is a File (unix philosophy) and (rel: use as little concepts when architecting software) the want to have as little concepts you need to understand to fully use MiZe. so then:
What is an Item??
An Item is some data with a certain type (mostly multiple types at once) that is accessible from every of your devices (with realtime updates) because it is managed by MiZe and not just stored on a Filesystem. This is similar to Files (with which everyone is very familiar), which contain any kind of data and have a Filetype acording to it’s Fileextension. The type of an item determines not just what it contains, but also what you can do with it like how can it be displayed, what programs can open it, how it can be used for automations (this is a big one!!) and how it can be transformed into other types of items. I envision a good help system, where there is a easy to find action to open a wiki page about this type, which will tell you: what it is, what it contains and what can be done with it (for normal users, but with a special mode if you are developer and therefore want different kind of information about a type).
Every piece of data is somehow stored as Bits, which is why every data can be stored in a file. The same is true for items with the addition, that items will represent things which you wouldn’t think as being something you’d find in a file, because it is a real world data value or updating quite fast (which you normally don’t see files doing), like screen brightness, state of a Smart Home light switch, current power usage of your house, current location of your phone, number of likes of your Youtube video and sooooooo much more.
The way you interact with items is way more structured then with files (where your program just writes arbitrary Bits): you use the MiZe API.