Logical 07019 - Household View

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Subject Area Concepts

The ARTS ODM V7.0/7.1 model represents consumers and households using a flexible, standard PartyAffiliation structure. PartyAffiliation is a generalized associative entity that links to individual Party instances.  There may be multiple kinds of PartyAffiliation. Household membership is one of the enumerated types.

A Party instance may be a Person subtype or a Household sub-type.  In ARTS, a Household is an identifiable, named, defined group of Person party subtypes  that make retail related decisions together.  Traditionally households are tied to residential addresses  and represent nuclear families.  Today these qualifiers of household don't always apply so it is a more generic way to gather individual parties into a economic decision making unit.

Households share some characteristics with Organization and Community entities - but they are of special importance to retailers because they represent groups of parties that purchase and consume products and services as an economic decision making unit.  The ARTS ODM is distinguishing households from organizations (which are more typically representing commercial, public of charitable business establishments) and communities (which may or may not have clearly delineated economic decision making capacity).

Within the ARTS ODM V7.0/7.1 retailers may choose to track consumers and customers at a household level OR at an individual person level or both.  ARTS provides a flexible, easy to extend representation of household using an entity-value-attribute (EAV).  Note that the EAV approach to extending household as well as other entity type attributes should be used in scenarios where the attributes apply to a relatively small number of entity type instances (often referred to as "outliers").  In scenarios where attributes apply to every instance it is better to add them as owned attributes of the entity (in this case to Household).

The ARTS household modeling strategy is illustrated with filled in tables below.

Figure 17: ARTS Household Worked Example

ARTS_ODM_V73_FIGURE_0009