Resources, Events and Agents (REA) is an economic ontology fathered by Professor William Mc''''''Carthy (BillMcCarthy) of Michigan State University and developed for the past 20 years by Mc''''''Carthy and a band of students and colleagues.

REA is a distillation of common business interactions into a very few moving parts, most notably:
	* Economic Resources = for example goods, services, money.
	* Economic Events = production, consumption or transfer of Economic Resources.
	* Economic Agents = people or "parties" who execute Economic Events.

Those three concepts and a few derivatives can describe any business interaction or system.

See also http://www.msu.edu/user/mccarth4/.

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''REA is an ontology or abstract semantic business model.  You could use it as a base model or metaphor for BusinessProcessManagement software.''