This is the first of a series about how to identify entities in data sources that can be readily classified as belonging to each of the 6BI Business Object Categories (BOCs): Parties, Things, Activities, Events, Locations and Motivators. I will start with Parties.
The Parties BOC (Business Object Category) identifies Who produces or consumes objects and concepts. Examples of commonly used data element[i] and data element collection[ii] names you may encounter in diverse types of data stores, that can be categorized under the Parties BOC, include but are not limited to those in the table below.[iii] They contain names commonly used to identify entities (e.g. tables in an RDBMS and documents in a DDBMS) and attributes (e.g. columns in tables and fields in documents). The list gives you a hint of what kind of names to look for in putting together a 6BI Analytic Schema for enabling your data to answer business questions.
Telling providers from consumers is important to recognize because it will tell you in which direction the product flows and in which direction the payment flows. Knowing this provides the basis for profitability and resource use efficiencies. Producing parties include such names as Producer, Provider, Seller, Supplier, Broker, Vendor for example. Examples of consuming party names include Consumer, Payer, Receiver, Buyer, Client, Customer. A Parties BOC name can also identify third parties such as Obligee, Specialist and Agency. Parties can be animate (Citizen, Patient) or inanimate (Bureau, Department). They can be collective (Organization) or singular (Person). These are some of the names you should look out for in analyzing source data systems. They can be names of data element collections (e.g. tables) and/or names of data elements (e.g. columns). Generally, they hold data about the object types within the Parties BOC which can then be used in answering the Who interrogative component of any query. Parties often come in pairs, the parties that produce or provide, and the parties that consume or pay. Thus, it is important that when you discover one or more Parties BOC entity in your source data that you ask the question, “Is this a producer or a consumer”? Of course, a single entity can be both a producer and a consumer depending primarily on the type of thing being measured and the type of activity that causes it to need to be measured. If a “first-party” (i.e. the party from whose perspective the measurements are taken) pays money in the transaction it will be the “consumer” in the scope of the transaction being analyzed. Otherwise the party is the “producer” in some manner and its performance will be measured by some assessment of relative value between product outflow and money inflow. Quite often both providers and consumers will be assessed in some manner, usually by an Assessor, as a result of the measurements.
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) the Role that a device plays in producing and consuming data now means that the Parties BOC includes non-traditionally human parties as well. As a matter of fact entities that previously were only considered as part of the Things BOC can now be parties. The concept of a party has gone beyond the traditional definitions of people and organizations but it still, at the end of the day, remains the producer and consumer of data.
[i] Wikipedia defines any unit of data defined for processing as a data element. Since 6BI deals with the meaning of data elements it is generally non-productive to consider any unit smaller than an attribute or field.
[ii] A data element collection is a set of related attributes or fields. Depending on the degree of normalization they are usually co-located in a container called a table or a document.
[iii] I would like to thank Barry Williams and his excellent Database Answers website http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/ for providing many of the table name examples.
Birkdale Computing 