2. AFD 2.0 building blocks

Outline of this chapter

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.