About Entity Families and Relationship Families

GE Digital APM uses two types of family: Entity and Relationship.

An Entity family is an organizational unit that is used for classifying elements within your organization. Records belonging to entity families store information that is related to physical items (e.g., equipment, people, analysis, and inspections) in your company or facility. For example, Full Inspection is an entity family that GE Digital APM provides in the baseline database. An individual Full Inspection would be one entity belonging to that family. Each entity family has a corresponding entity family table in the GE Digital APM database. Entity family records are what you view and manage in the Record Manager.

A Relationship family corresponds to a database table that is used to connect two entity family tables. Relationship definitions can be used for each relationship family to specify the entity families to which it relates. For example, in the baseline GE Digital APM database, the Has Reference Documents relationship family relates the Full Inspection entity family with the Reference Document entity family.

When two entity families have been related to one another through a relationship family, records within those entity families can be linked, meaning that a connection can be created between the two records. For example, a Full Inspection record might be linked to a Reference Document record that stores information about the item that was inspected. The link itself is defined by a record that is stored in the Has Reference Documents relationship family table.