My apologies for the long delay since the last post in this series, but the real world got in the way, in the form of a job opportunity I just could not say “no” to.
This is the fourth in a series of posts about how to identify entities in data sources that can readily be classified as belonging to each of the 6BI Business Object Categories (BOCs): Parties, Things, Activities, Locations, Events and Motivators. The third post in the series (on Activities, the “How” aspect) can be found at https://birkdalecomputing.com/2017/05/24/identifying-activities/. Please note also that I changed the order of Locations and Events because I want to discuss Locations next and save until last what I consider to be the two most complex BOCs, Events and Motivators.
The Locations BOC identifies Where things get produced and consumed by parties. Concepts and objects in this BOC capture data about, not only physical locations, but virtual locations as well. Data element and data element collection names you may encounter that belong to the Locations BOC include, but are not limited to, names in the following table[i]. 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. 
Usage often determines whether Location or Thing is the appropriate BOC for any given object or concept. For example, Webpage, Portal, Database, and Dashboard are all objects that depend on context and can either be a thing or describe where a thing is located. Also, Document, Source and Destination can designate places as well as being things. The key to the Locations BOC is to include only those objects and/or concepts that actually refer to a Place or a Site, and not to just the description of the place or the site. The Sites and Addresses are synonymous and can be either physical or virtual.
Locations exist whether we use them or not. However, it is usually, at least for business purposes, only when a member of one of the other BOCs, usually parties or things, is placed at a specific site when an activity or event occurs that locations become relevant. This can best be determined if you ask yourself how important is it to know where some activity took place, where an event or where some party or thing is located. Does being located at one site as opposed to any other site make a difference? Is the measurement of performance impacted by the site of one or more of the objects or concepts under consideration. If the answer is “yes” within the context being considered then location is a factor to consider in our data analysis.
Locations are often nested hierarchies as in Country, Region, State, County, City, Street, Postal Code, Zone, Building, etc. This hierarchy impacts the level of aggregation of the data. The larger the scope of the location, or the further apart the sites are within a given level of the hierarchy, generally the more parties and things are included. The more of these objects and concepts (parties and things) are included in the measurement the less likely the details of any one specific party or thing will influence the data at that level. This is an application of the law of large numbers. This fact is one reason why it is important to be able is dis-aggregate your data when it is needed. Enterprise performance is measured by buying and selling lots of things, but those large numbers are generated one item at a time as often as not.
[i] 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.
Tags: 6BI, Analytic Schema, Business Intelligence, Business Object Categories, Data Modeling
Birkdale Computing 
Leave a Reply