The TCA relationship model lets you record complex, real-life relationships among entities in the TCA Registry. You can analyze not only direct relationships such as those with your competitors, but also indirect ones such as your customers' customers. You can also manage hierarchical relationships to better understand, for example, the management hierarchy within an organization.
A relationship represents the way two entities interact with each other, based on the role that each entity takes with respect to the other. For example, the employment relationship between a person and an organization is defined by the role of the person as the employee and the organization as the employer.
In addition, every relationship is reciprocal. Each entity is either the subject or object, depending on the perspective, or direction. For example, if Joe is the employee of Oracle, then Joe is the subject and Oracle is the object. Oracle as the employer of Joe, which flips the subject and object, still describes the same relationship.
A relationship phrase and role pair contains a correlating phrase pair and role pair, which describes the reciprocal roles that the two entities play in the relationship. For example, a relationship phrase and role pair contains the Employee Of and Employer Of phrase pair as well as the Employee and Employer role pair.
Every relationship is based on a relationship phrase and role pair. Even though only phrase pairs are used in Relationship Manager, the corresponding role pair is still stored in the system for each relationship.
A phrase pair, such as Employee Of and Employer Of, describe the role of either entity in the relationship as the subject. For example, Joe as the subject of the relationship would have Employee Of as the phrase, and Oracle as the subject would have Employer Of. The other entity in the relationship would be the object.
A relationship role pair, such as Employee and Employer, describes the two entities no matter the direction of the relationship. For example, Joe has the Employee role and Oracle the Employer role, both as either the subject or object.
Each relationship phrase and role pair also determines the type of entities for the relationship. For example, the Employer Of phrase and Employer role can be defined so that the employer must be a party of type Organization and the employee a party of type Person.
When you create a relationship with a relationship phrase or role, the reverse direction of the relationship is automatically created with the other phrase or role in the pair. For example, if you define Joe as the employee of Oracle, Oracle as the employer of Joe is also created.
Each relationship phrase and role pair belongs to a relationship type, which categorizes the types of relationships that you can create. For example, the relationship phrase and role pair described above would belong to an employment relationship type.
Relationship types determine if the relationships created with the type are hierarchical, and if not, whether they can be circular or not. For more information, see: Relationship Characteristics.
Every relationship type must contain at least one phrase and role pair. TCA provides seeded relationship types and phrase and role pairs, but your administrator can create new ones as needed. See: Administering Relationships and Seeded Relationship Types, Phrases, and Roles, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Reference Guide.
Both directions of a relationship share a start and end date. The start date signifies when the relationship starts, not necessarily when it was created. Likewise, the end date is when the relationship ends.
The relationship date range helps you analyze the history of an entity's relationships. For example, you can see that Joe used to work for Oracle in a subsidiary location for the past two years but has been working at Oracle headquarters since last month.
In general, relationship groups are used to determine which relationship roles and phrases are displayed in specific application user interfaces. Groups can also be used to categorize roles and phrases for other functional uses.
Note: Relationship groups do not apply to Relationship Manager. All seeded and user-created relationship phrases are available.
Relationships have additional characteristics that relationship types determine.
A hierarchical relationship ranks one entity above the other. For example, in an employment relationship, the employer is ranked above the employee. In the employment hierarchy, the employee would be a child that appears below its parent, the employer. Hierarchical relationships are created with phrase and role pairs that belong to a hierarchical relationship type.
If a relationship type allows for circular relationships, you can create a relationship from Party A to Party B to Party C and back to Party A. For example, Party A is a competitor of Party B, which is a competitor of Party C, which is a competitor of Party A.
Hierarchical relationships cannot be circular. For example, if Alan's manager is Jenny, and Jenny's manager is Chris, then Chris's manager cannot be Alan.
Nonhierarchical relationship types can either allow or prevent circular relationships. For example, marital relationships cannot be circular, while competitive relationships described above can.