Party and product are the most frequent master data domains around.
Often you meet party as one of the most frequent party roles being customer and supplier (or vendor) or by another term related to the context as for example citizen, patient, member, student, passenger and many more. These are the people and legal entities we are interacting with and with whom we usually exchange money – and information.
Product (or material) is the things we buy, make and sell. The goods (or services) we exchange.
In my current venture called Product Data Lake our aim to serve the exchange of information about products between trading partners who are customers and suppliers in business ecosystems.
For that, we have been building a data model. Below you see our first developed conceptual data model, which has party and product as the core entities.
As this is a service for business ecosystems, another important entity is the partnership between suppliers and customers of products and the information about the products.
The product link entity in this data model is handling the identification of products by the pairs of trading partners. In the same way, this data model has link entities between the identification of product attributes at pair of trading partners (build on same standards or not) as well as digital asset types.
If you are offering product information management services, at thus being a potential Product Data Lake ambassador, or you are part of a business ecosystem with trading partners, I will be happy to discus with you about adding handling of trading partnerships and product information exchange to your current model.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 