Glossary

Business entity

Also called: business entities

An object, actor, event or transaction the organization needs to know about, manage or evaluate, such as Customer, Request, Contract or Payment.

An object, actor, event or transaction the organization needs to know about, manage or evaluate, such as Customer, Request, Contract or Payment. It is discovered from the ontological model and validated with business users before becoming a data structure.

The test of a well-identified entity is that it survives a change of system. If it disappears when the application is replaced, it was a table rather than an entity of the business.

Related terms

Attribute

A declared property of an entity or metamodel object. It is the unit on which measurement rests: every indicator quantifies an attribute of an identified measurement object.

Data model

The structuring of business concepts into entities, attributes, relationships, domains, keys and referential integrity.

Master data

Shared reference entities consumed by multiple processes and systems, such as customer, supplier or product.

Ontological model

The formal vocabulary of the business: the actors, objects, events, transactions and outcomes the organization handles, and how they relate.

Semantic control at the point of creation

The principle that reuse precedes creation: before creating an entity, one must check whether the concept already exists.