Resource Event Agent

Resources, Events and Agents (REA) is an economic ontology fathered by Professor William McCarthy (BillMcCarthy) of Michigan State University and developed for the past 20 years by McCarthy and a band of students and colleagues.

REA is a distillation of common business interactions into a very few moving parts, most notably:

• Economic Resources = for example goods, services, money.
• Economic Events = production, consumption or transfer of Economic Resources.
• Economic Agents = people or "parties" who execute Economic Events.

Those three concepts and a few derivatives can describe any business interaction or system.

See also http://www.msu.edu/user/mccarth4/.

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REA is an ontology or abstract semantic business model. You could use it as a base model or metaphor for BusinessProcessManagement software.