Node

Definition

• A digital representation of a person, thing or concept.
• A Entity has zero or more Attributes

As Used In Higgins

• Most Entities have one LocalId Attribute
• Some of the Attributes of an Entity may be EntityId references to other Entities in the same or different Contexts
• Although any given person (or thing or concept, etc.) is relevant to, and exists within a given Context, a single person may be represented as one (or more) Entities in one Context and (an)other Entity(ies) in other Contexts. By linking or "federating" these disparate Entities one can gain a more unified view of a given person. Contexts representing different systems, organizations and entire enterprises with widely varying storage and trust models are handled using this Entity linking approach. For example the person "Bob Smith" could be represented as two Entities; the first having "bsmith" as an LocalId and the second having "bob" as a LocalId. These two Entities may be in the same or in different Contexts.
• Contexts can be nested (e.g. enterprises have sub-organizations, and there are systems within an enterprise/org, etc.) or related through other means (employment/HR system vs. customer system where same person is a customer and an employee). Thus linking the Entities relevant to those contexts provides an overall view of an Entity (or at least a partial "overall" view to those Contexts).
• The information contained in one Entity is not necessarily a pure subset of the union of all of the information contained in all of the linked Entities representing a person taken together. There is no consistency constraint imposed between the Entities of an person. For example, a person could be represented such that their name was Joe in one Entity in one Context and JoAnn in Entity.

See Also

• ContextId
• LocalId

Links

• Higgins Home