Business term¶
A human-facing Concept Manifestation used in conversations, documentation, user interfaces, policies, and governance
What is a business term?¶
A Business Term is a human-facing Concept Manifestation. It is how people speak about a Data Element Concept, or Concept for short.
Multiple Business Terms can point to one Concept wherever their meanings agree. For example, "Customer identifier" and "Customer ID" can name the same Concept across sales, service and billing. A change of language or use case does not require a new Concept. Matching words alone do not establish that their meanings agree.
Key characteristics¶
- User-facing: used in documentation, policies, UI, and conversation.
- Context-specific: a term may mean different things in different contexts.
- Governable: business owners can decide whether two terms really mean the same Concept.
- Mergeable: Concepts can be merged later when owners agree that they mean the same thing.
Examples¶
- "Customer"
- "Counterparty"
- "Risk Position"
- "Beneficial Owner"
Business terms as manifestations¶
A Business Term is a specialization of
ekg-concept:ConceptManifestation.
It carries human-readable lexical forms such as:
- preferred label
- synonym
- abbreviation
- singular form
- plural form
- short UI label
ekg-concept:preferredBusinessTerm links the Data Element Concept
to the Business Term that supplies its preferred display label.
Facts¶
About these facts
We're not prescribing a full OWL ontology here. These are minimal facts you can use to build your own ontology, schema, or graph model.
BusinessTerm¶
- Subclass of ConceptManifestation
- All manifestation facts apply here.
- Language
- A natural language tag should be used when the form is language-specific.
- Lexical form
- Use a label or value for the exact business-facing text.
- Preferred role
- A Concept can mark one Business Term as its preferred business-facing manifestation in a given context.