André Leclerc | informatics consultant |
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This page documents the artifacts that make up models of business domains.
Subject |
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This is a subject or theme of major interest or importance to an organization's business. It can, for example, be a major function, service, business line, resource or product of that same organization. Subjects are used to classify and group use cases and components of information systems. |
The descriptive data to capture on each subject include:
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Examples of subjects:
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Domain of Values |
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A domain of values is a list or range of acceptable values that is used to validate the values of many similar properties of business components. It is a modeling artifact that is referred to by properties of business components to enable the reuse of simple data validation rules. |
The descriptive data to capture on each domain of values include:
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Examples of domains of values:
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Use Case |
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A use case of an information system is a typical use of that same system, in which certain actors use certain functions or capabilities of the information system to achieve a specific business goal or result. One or many business components of the information system may be called into play at various stages of a use case. A use case can be more or less complex depending on the number of functions invoked and on the number of business components involved. |
The descriptive data to capture on each use case include:
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A simple list of actions may not be enough for use cases that are not simple. It is then necessary to develop a more elaborate description, showing the actions carried out by the various participants, including the information system, and, step by step if need be, the data exchanges, the control points, the different processing paths that can be taken, and the various results that can be produced by this use case. |
Examples of use cases of a system:
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Actor in Use Cases |
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An actor in the context of use cases is a person, an organization, an external system or some other thing that plays a role in at least one use case. It is a modeling artifact that is referred to by the descriptions of the use cases that the actors have a role to play. |
The descriptive data to capture on each actor include:
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Business Component |
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A business component of an information system is a functional piece of that information system that manages data via its properties and methods, and via its associations with other business components. |
The descriptive data to capture on each business component include:
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A business component's primary key is used to uniquely identify and locate instances of this business component. All properties involved in the primary key's expression must be mandatory properties, i.e., properties that must have values. Secondary keys are also used to identify and locate instances of a business component. However, they do not necessarily contain unique values and the properties involved in any secondary key's expression may be optional properties. |
Examples of business components:
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Business Component Property |
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A property of a business component carries values of a certain data type for that business component. Most properties carry simple data values such as a numeric, alphanumeric, alphabetic, text, date, logical or binary value. Other properties are more complex and carry multiple data values of various types. Those latter properties are typed by business components instead of one of the basic data types enumerated above. Examples of properties follow the descriptive data below. |
The descriptive data to capture on each business component property include:
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Examples of properties:
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Business Component Method |
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A method of a business component is a series of logical operations that are carried out by the business component whenever it is called upon to fulfill its share of responsibilities in some of the information system's use cases. A method can receive data values or references to data objects via its parameters, and can return a data value or object. Just like the properties of business components, those data values or objects, passed or returned, can be simple ones or complex ones. Some methods have parameters while others do not, and some methods return a data value or object while others return nothing. |
The descriptive data to capture on each business component method include:
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The logic implemented by a method may be specified in more or less detail with pseudo code, decision tables, decision trees or just plain text (see a simple methodology for specifying the logical behaviours of an information system's business components). |
Examples of methods:
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Business Component Association |
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An association of a business component is an association with another business component or with itself that denotes an important rule of the information system's business domain. |
The descriptive data to capture on each business component association include:
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Examples of associations:
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