Person / Individual Roles Sub-Model

People play an increasing number of roles throughout the course of their life or their employment, and the nature of these roles can change over time too. This can also be said for the roles played by a subtype of an individual, such as Employee. Think about the challenge of tracking the different roles that a person may play over a long period of time:

An employee has various roles, with a start and an end date. This may coincide with an association with a particular company or organization unit that begins and ends at a certain point in time.

An individual has a Spouse role, also with a start and possible end date with another individual.

Once more, this confirms that role details are much more than just an additional attribute or two attached to an entity. We can combine what is really a classic structure of an individual's roles together with time-dependency attributes as shown next.