03 Jun 1996 updated
These process information views are also important when reviewing the models with the business people. You only review the process information view that relates to each process they are concerned with. They may not care about attributes that other parts of the business care about and it takes too long to try and focus only on their piece if they see it all. It also takes too long to hide or mask information not relevant to them.
It seems that most people want the ability to view the model from various perspectives (views). Some want the capability to view the model from an entity perspective, some from a process perspective, and some from a subject area perspective. (There are even more views defined in ADW.) These perspectives are again another object in the meta-model with associations to the objects in the ER model.
It doesn't matter which type of perspective you choose, you are just associating entities, attributes within the entities, and relationships to the perspective you've chosen. If view type = entity, you would satisfy 1 above, if view type = process you would satisfy 2, and if view type = subject area you would satisfy 3. Each site then can impose their standards, methodology or rules as to what objects can be in which view. If a site wants to have one entity belong to only one subject area view, that's their choice. The tool doesn't have to contain a built in methodology. Each site should have their own standards and method of measuring or enforcing their rules. Building the enforcement in the tool will limit other sites in the way they use the tool.
Our design space is a cube (or n-dimensional thing which is harder to visualize). All these design objects exist inside the cube. We can slice it and dice it any way we like: from the top, in plan view, where all entities and relationships show in a confusing tangle (the global data model); through a single filtered slice (a traditional subject area or sub-model); through a filter of any arbitrary or logical collection of objects - process involvement, relationship kinship, shared components, shared ownership, use-case. I don't care. It's all the same if you have enough properties on the meta-object to classify and the diagram tools to select.