Business Data Model elements

These topics list the Business Data Model elements.

Package
A package is a grouping of Business Data Model elements for organizational purposes. Packages define informational domains and partition data concepts by grouping them according to business responsibilities, allowing clear separation of concepts and enhanced content classification. Packages are based on the business categories and can serve as a basis to define the IT components boundaries. Packages with too many members can be organized in hierarchies to enhance navigation. This package construct is applicable to InfoSphere Data Architect and is not available in CA ERwin.
Fundamental entity
A Business Data Model (BDM) fundamental entity represents a business concept, at different levels of abstraction. It can be concrete, such as a person or a product, or it can be a useful abstraction, representing commonalities between a number of concrete concepts, such as a party that is a person or an organization. Fundamental entities are organized in a type hierarchy, which classifies them from the more abstract ones down to the most specific ones and helps to define common properties.
Association and Associative entity
The Business Data Model (BDM) uses two constructs to model the relationships between fundamental entities in the model: direct associations and associative entities. When an association is between two fundamental entities, has no descriptive data on it and has one nature to the association, then a direct association is used. When an association is between more than two fundamental entities, contains data or can have several contexts (relationship types) then an associative entity is used. A direct association is the more common construct used in the Business Data Model.
Relationship
A relationship is used to represent a logical link between an independent entity (the parent), and a dependent entity (the child), and is labelled with a verb phrase that describes the link between the parent and the child. A relationship has an associated cardinality which specifies the number of instances of the child that are related to an instance of the parent. An associative entity is always the child of two relationships to its parent fundamental entities. The relationship properties are identified from the description of the business terms that the associative entity originates from.
Attribute
A Business Data Model attribute represents a single information concept at the most granular level that describes a fundamental entity or an associative entity.
Data domain
A data domain defines the type of data value that is held by an attribute in a data model. IBM Industry Models are delivered with predefined data domains.
Diagram
A diagram is a graphical representation of Business Data Model elements and their relationships. It helps to show in a graphical form how model elements are related to each other. A diagram is also used to represent the Business Data Model elements that belong to a project scope.

Parent topic: Business Data Model