2. AFD 2.0 building blocks

This chapter describes the building blocks of AFD 2.0.

The All Finance Data catalog consists of entities, attributes, data types, codelists and code values:

1. An entity describes an object or thing from reality, for example a policy, party or claim.
2. An attribute describes a characteristic of an entity, for example the date of birth of the policyholder, or the expiry date of the policy.
3. A data type describes a class of values with a common scope and similar structure. An example is the data type Date that is linked to all “date attributes” in AFD.
4. A codelist is an enumeration of possible values that an attribute can contain. For example, a list of possible colors for the ‘color’ attribute. Not all attributes are linked to a codelist: for many attributes (e.g. ‘surname’ or ‘city’) values can be entered freely.