Resource type design principles

When to create a new Resource Type

Resources with the same Resource Type should be interchangeable in use. In other words, for a particular purpose (for example, an input to a process), any Resource of the designated Resource Type can be used.

Resources that are not interchangeable in use should have different Resource Types.

If they don't, your Resource Types are too broad.

For example, if you created a Resource Type called "Transducer", it would be too broad, because Joint-type Transducers, Constriction Transducers, Intrinsic Transducers, etc. have different uses. They are not interchangeable.

So you need a different Resource Type for each type of transducer.

But if your Resource Types are like Constriction Transducer #12345, they are too narrow.

Versions

Should you create a different Resource Type for each version of a product or component?

Depends. We basically decided that different versions could be represented by different Resources, and did not need a different Resource Type for each version. But that decision might need to be modified now and then if different versions of a component, for example, are not interchangeable, and you would need to specify for a process input which version of the component was required. This is a fuzzy decision, because you can always pick which resource you wanted to use in the labnotes for the process.

So Resource Types and versions will need more practice before any general rule can be relied on.

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