Universal Relations

These universal relations (or universal relationships) are a high-level set of relations, also known as fundational relations, that apply across business areas and domains. Many domain-specific relations are subtypes of these relations, frequently with domain-specific names.

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Universal Relations: what, why, who, when, where, and how

What are they? A tool for identifying, naming, and specifying entity relationships.

Why should I bother? Because utilizing universal relations:

• will make your models clearer, more consistent and more precise thus helping your model audience understand both your models and the world better
• will help to illustrate patterns
• can assist with data interoperability
• can improve machine learning and artificial/assisted intelligence.

Who? Who assigns these universal relations? Any knowledgeable person, certainly the data modeler or business analyst would be responsible for this. I've found that subject matter experts frequently understand them easily enough they can sometimes select one themselves! Who uses the universal relations? The people that need to understand the business: business managers, subject matter experts, data modelers, business analysts, data analysts, data scientists, etc.

When do we assign them? As early as practical during the process of gathering and documenting your data requirements.

Where do we document the Universal Relations? Wherever you document your data requirements. I recommend using an analysis data model in whatever format your organization uses.

How do I determine the most appropriate relation? Review the name, examples, definitions, and domain and range entity constraints.

Universal Relations

Relation Category	Relation Name	Reverse Relation Name
typehood	is type of	has type
parthood	is part of (material or spatial)	has part (material)
parthood	is part of (process)	has part (process)
participation	is participant in	has participant
participation	is subject participant in	has subject participant
participation	is target participant in	has target participant
classification	is classification of	has classification
containment	is contained in	contains
spatial	is located in	spatially contains
spatial	is spatially contained in	spatially contains
temporal	follows	is followed by
causation	is causally related to	has cause
causation	triggers	is triggered by
concretization	is concretized as	is concretization of
transformation	is transformation of	transforms into

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following people for their contributions:

• Ed Landale

References

• Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)
• OBO Foundry
• gist