Understanding 'relationships/'

I’m trying to understand the use of relationships in urls. http://jsonapi.org/format/#fetching-relationships

How is article/1/author different from article/1/relationships/author ?

Is the URL for data about the author (e.g. their name).
DELETEing this resource would remove the author from your dataset. i.e. no articles would have this author

Is the URL for information about the identity (within the API) of the author.
DELETEing this resource would remove linkage for this article only. i.e. article 1 would have no author.
This is similar to the idea of an associative table when dealing with many-to-many relationships in a database.

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Ah very cool. It’s exposing the concept of Associative Entity.