COMMERCE MODEL
An Event-Defined Common Ontology
A common commerce model facilitates interoperable e-commerce and supply chain event management (SCEM) across industries by ensuring that foundational terms and concepts are used in a unified and semantically compatible manner.
The model supports parties that offer products and services that are exchanged and performed at and between locations through agreements.
PARTY
The top-level “Party” class comprises “Person” and “Organization” subclasses (Figure 5), enabling a single class to assume one or more roles (e.g. customer/vendor) and legal ownership of physical (e.g., device) and informational (e.g., order) objects. The “Organization” class supports containment of one organization within another.
An instance of the “Party” class is assigned as the owner of an object (via the “Owning Party” attribute of the root Object class). With this approach, every object is owned by a party and is assigned to an owning party when it is created. An owner party can be the person who creates the object using a device or an organization associated with the person or device. The owning party is given all the authorities to the object.
LOCATION
The top-level “Location” class represents any place or geographic position with subclasses supporting geolocation containment, as well as space subdivisions within a building (e.g., a Zone, Level, Terminal, or Room). The “Site” subclass includes unique attributes supporting a postal address. A location can be assigned to a party, asset, and service (via a Relation attribute within those classes).
OFFERING
The top-level “Offering” class and subclasses can classify products and services based on their essential attributes and their relationships to related offerings. This hierarchy enables trading partners to group offering instances in the same manner for comparisons across multiple e-commerce sites.
In addition to the “Identifier” attribute of the root Object class, an Offering instance can be identified by alternate Identifier attributes within the Offering class or subclass (e.g., “Model”, “GTIN”).
ASSET
The top-level “Asset” class and subclasses (“Inventory”, “Equipment”) represent resources or supplies that can be traded, transformed, used, or consumed to produce benefit. A production unit, based on a Product instance, usually begins as an inventory asset of the manufacturer (an “Inventory” instance) and transitions to an equipment asset of a customer (an “Equipment” instance). The “Product” Relation attribute within the “Asset” class enables an asset to inherit the attributes of a Product subclass, in addition to the attributes of the Asset class (multiple inheritance).
AGREEMENT
The top-level “Agreement” class represents any negotiated and typically legally binding arrangement between parties as to a course of action. Its “Party” Relation attribute identifies one party (e.g., [Brand]), while the “Owning Party” Relation attribute of the root object identifies another party (e.g., Heathrow Ltd.) in the agreement.