Introduction to Vocabularies, Entities, and Terms

Vocabularies, entities, and terms are the basic building blocks of a business rules database. Vocabularies contain entities, and entities contain terms.
Object
Description
Vocabulary
Vocabularies contain one or more business entities. Vocabularies enable you to categorize and structure the entities and terms needed to create a rules database.
Entity
An entity is an object in a business domain. For example, an entity could be Customer, Transaction, or Account. Entities contain terms. They group terms into logical units. Entities are not mapped to tables or to table columns when rules flows are published.
Term
A term is an attribute of an entity. For example, a customer entity might have terms such as name, address, and income. A transaction entity might contain terms for date, time, transaction amount, and account number. Terms are the objects with which you build business rules.
A business rule can have condition terms and action terms. Suppose your rule is if balance>1000 then account="premium". The term balance is a condition term, and account is an action term.
Terms are mapped to table columns by the applications that use published rule flows that are within metadata.