about a person you may look for any "ID" suffix to understand how the remote system may differentiate two distinct records. Required fields Representation Terms are also used to make inferences about the requirements of a property. For example, if a data stream had Data Element PersonBirthDateAndTime you would know that BOTH the date AND time are available and relevant, not just the date. If the birth time was optional, a separate data elements should be used such as PersonBirthDate and PersonBirthTime. Finding data warehouse dimensions and measures When creating a data warehouse, a business analyst looks at the Representation Terms to quickly find the dimensions and measures of a subject matter in order to build OLAP cubes. For example: Indicator or Code are used to create data warehouse dimensions Date or DateTime are used to relate to the time dimension, which are frequently shared between cubes using conformed dimensions Amount, Number, Measure or Value terms (which can be added together) are candidates for a measurement Name and Text are used for screen labels or other descriptive elements Percent needs to be analyzed since they can't really be added together with clear meaning ID is used to remove duplicate records Core Components Technical Specification The joint ISO/UN Core Components Technical Specification formally define both the allowed set of representation terms and the corresponding set of data types. ISO 15000-5 is an implementation layer of ISO 11179 and normatively expresses a set of rules to semantically define conceptual and physical/logical data models for a wide variety of uses. In ISO 15000-5, the representation term provides a mechanism to harmonize the value domains of candidate data elements before being added to the overall data model(s). ISO 15000-5 is being used by a number of government, standards development organizations, and private sector as the basis for data modeling. Universal Data Element Framework Some informal standards such as the Universal Data Element Framework (which refer to a Representation Term as a "Property Word") assign unique integer IDs to each Representation Term. This allows metadata mapping tools to map one set of data elements into other metadata vocabularies. An example of these mappings can be found at Property word ID. Note that as of November 2005 the UDEF concepts have not been widely adopted. Example of representation terms as an XML suffix For example, if an XML Data fragment had the following: 123-45-6789 John Smith