data item

A data item is a unit of data with a defined data type. The data type associated with the data item is either elementary, complex or a collection.

Data items are referencing each other in a defined hierarchical way. In general, each data item has exactly one owner and data items do not own each other recursively. The topmost owner is the root object space of a database.

The way, data items are stored, is described as persistence type of an item, which is either persistent, temporary or transient.

Data items also have an activity status, which is defined within a process or application, i.e. the same data item may have different activity states in different applications.