How should business concepts be modeled in applications?

Modeling business concepts in applications as entities is foundational to creating an effective data model that reflects real-world business scenarios. Entities represent distinct objects or concepts within an application, encapsulating both properties (attributes) and behaviors (methods) that are critical for the business. When you model as entities, you define a structure that allows for the encapsulation of data and functionality, which is a key principle of object-oriented design.

Entities provide a means of organizing and managing data in a way that mirrors the business operations or rules. This allows developers to easily interact with and manipulate this data within the context of the business logic and workflows of the application. Moreover, entities can be related to one another, supporting complex relationships that can be essential for representing real-life scenarios accurately.

In comparison, while entity diagrams offer a graphical representation of entities and their relationships, they do not encapsulate behavior or provide a direct data structure needed for implementation. Similarly, database tables, while useful for physical storage of data, are more of a technical representation that abstracts away the business concepts. Lastly, entity relationships refer to how entities interact with and relate to one another but do not by themselves represent the business concepts directly. Therefore, modeling business concepts as entities not only supports better data management but also