Compound Party Model?

[Tom R.]

I recently read about the Party Model (and looked at Daniel Shanahan's example at http://www.newleafdata.com/downloads.php), which has separate tables for People and Organizations that are related to a Party table. I've been thinking about how to create a compound or multi party model, but I'm not sure how to proceed.

 

This would be for a database that catalogues deeds, mortgages, and other legal documents on file in various county archives. These documents typically have one or more grantors and one or more grantees. The current version of the database has a People table and a Documents table, and records are related via join tables (one for Grantors and one for Grantees). The People table contains info for both people and organizations. 

 

This works fine when the grantors and grantees are all individuals, but I frequently run into cases where a party is comprised of 2 or more people/organizations in relation to each other, e.g.

 

• Jim Smith and Elaine Smith, as husband and wife
• Bob Jones, as Trustee of The Robert Jones Family Trust
• Bran Stark and Arya Stark as Co-Personal Representatives of the Estate of Ned Stark
• Buckaroo Bonzai as Attorney in Fact for Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems
• Karl Wallenda, Herman Wallenda, and Joseph Wallenda as Joint Tenants

One complication is that a party can be related to multiple documents as either grantor or grantee, but (more so for people than organizations) often don't use a name consistently. For instance, a single person might appear in various documents as

• J. T. Newman,
• John Newman,
• John Thomas Newman, and
• John T. Newman, Sr.

I was planning to add a field for "alsoKnownAs" in the join tables to handle these circumstances, but if I switch to a party model or something similar, I'm not sure how I would handle the name variations. 

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Tom

 

 

 

[Tom R.]

Well, I've been doing some more thinking on the topic, and sometimes for me it's hard to see the forrest for the trees. But I finally figured the best way to handle this scenario would be to have a self-join with the Parties table, so that in addition to relating to a Person record or Organization record, a Party record could be related to multiple other parties (of mixed person or organization type).