Summary
In this chapter, we've explored the idea of a business network. We've studied participants, assets, transactions, and events and seen that, in some sense, all business networks share the same concerns.
By using a participant—an individual, organization, system, or device—we were able to properly describe what initiates transactions that capture changes in the business network. Using an asset—a thing of value, whether tangible or intangible—we were able to describe and understand the resources that move between participants, and how they express the reason participants interact with each other. In combination, participants and assets allowed us to understand how a change is captured in a transaction. Finally, using events allowed us to understand when significant changes to the network happened and act upon them using loose coupling.
We spent a few moments discussing how these concepts are consumed using APIs, and in the next chapter...