Defining a business network

Let's summarize the preceding ideas succinctly to introduce the idea of a business network:

A business network contains a collection of participants and assets that undergo a life cycle described by a series of transactions. An event can occur when a transaction completes.

We might be slightly surprised that after all that build-up, we find that a couple of apparently simple sentences describe all this complexity.

Don't be deceived by this simplicity. As we understand in more detail the ideas of a participant, asset, transaction, and event, we'll see that we've learned a language vocabulary, which allow us to build sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and even whole books.

Similarly, although a business network is not something we can physically see or touch, like a language, it's the most real of things. It will influence how we see and how we think, how we design and implement our system, and ultimately how it...