Revisions to isComponent

[timgdavies]

If #317 is accepted, then some of the justification for isComponent is removed. This issue suggests further revision of isComponent to remove it from personStatement and entityStatement and to consider renaming it to parentStatement to highlight that it represents a hierarchical relationship between direct (child) and indirect (parent) relationships.

How does isComponent currently function

The purpose of isComponent is poorly explained in current documentation, but at least one of the motivations for it's presence appears to be _"the replacement of this [Component] Ownership-or-control Statement SHOULD be considered when replacing the primary Ownership-or-control Statement,".

The disclosureDetails approach to statement replacement removes the need for this.

This leaves isComponent as an explicit signal to consuming applications that some direct relationship between two entities is being disclosed because it is a component of an indirect relationship between some person and some entity.

The diagram below shows that, for the network:

(Source)

Using isComponent we would have one 'master' ownershipOrControl statement, and all the 'components' pointing to it with an isComponent relationship:

isComponent is primarily a relationship between ownershipOrControlStatements, but personStatement and entityStatement objects also currently have isComponent.

This implies that if multiple indirect relationships existed a single disclosure (e.g. Person 1 indirectly controls Company B by two different disclosable routes), the personStatement and entityStatement components of a relationship would have to be repeated. This is not desirable.

Outline proposal for changes

isComponent should be removed from personStatement and entityStatement.

The case for explicit fields to record the relationship between an indirect ownershipOrControlStatement and the direct ownershipOrControlStatements that make it up (wholly or partially) should be more clearly documented, with particular attention to:

• The workflows by which this data would be created
• How consuming applications may use this data

Consideration should be given to changing the isComponent relationship between ownershipOrControlStatements to become parentStatement because this more clearly articulates the idea that a direct statement exists in the dataset by virtue of disclosure of the indirect relationship.