The Single Responsible-Party Principle (SRPP)

Throughout the information lifecycle of infrastructure engineering, the responsibility for information is a key concern. These responsibilities influence the organization of all relevant information repositories, including BIS Repositories.

For this reason, it is helpful when we can identify a single responsible-party for any piece of information in a BIS Repository. To facilitate the identification of the responsible party for information, all domain authors and developers should follow these two rules:

• A Model should have a single responsible-party at any given point in time.
• Sub-modeled Elements may have a different responsible-party than their sub-Model.

The first rule facilitates mapping of Models to ISO 19650 “information containers”, among other practical considerations. The second rule allows a responsible-party to delegate responsibility for the detailed sub-modeling of an Element to another party.

The responsible-parties may be organizations or individuals. Because there are typically different responsible-parties for different disciplines, it naturally follows that one should not model multiple disciplines in a single Model.

In the physical perspective, responsibilities are generally assigned according to systems, with one party responsible for designing a given system. This drives organization within the physical partition. For details see Physical Hierarchy.

The SRPP essentially defines a workflow-driven constraint on the organization of Elements into Models. Within that constraint, there is a high degree of flexibility regarding the Element/Model organization. Generally, the organization of Elements and Models that are the responsibility of a single party should be driven by anticipated user workflows, keeping in mind the practical ramifications of Models, described in Model Fundamentals.

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