Resources, Events and Agents (REA) is an economic ontology fathered by Professor William McCarthy (BillMcCarthy) of Michigan State University and developed for the past 20 years by McCarthy and a band of students and colleagues.
REA is a distillation of common business interactions into a very few moving parts, most notably:
- Economic Resources = for example goods, services, money.
- Economic Events = production, consumption or transfer of Economic Resources.
- Economic Agents = people or "parties" who execute Economic Events.
Those three concepts and a few derivatives can describe any business interaction or system.
See also http://www.msu.edu/user/mccarth4/.
REA is an ontology or abstract semantic business model. You could use it as a base model or metaphor for BusinessProcessManagement software.