Chapter 4. Party archetype pattern

4.1 Business context

The Party archetype pattern describes how to represent essential information about people and organizations. We use Party as a general term for a person or an organization such as a business.

Almost every business is concerned to some degree with maintaining information about parties and about the roles that these parties play in various relationships with them. This concern is as old as business itself. Even in very early business activities based around barter, transactions were predicated on trust, and that was based on having some knowledge, whether formally represented or not, of your trading partners.

One very common problem is that many businesses have no standard and unified way ...

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