The distinction between types and occurrences is especially important during life-cycle analysis.
Each life-cycle of entity type is a description of the possible "lives" that are led by entities of that type. However, each entity occurrence leads a life that go through only some of the states that are compatible with the life-cycle of its type.
An entity life is a description of what happens to an entity from the time it becomes of interest to an enterprise to the time it ceases to be of interest to that enterprise.
An entity is considered not to exist until the business becomes interested in it. For example, the person Fred Smith, though 45 years old, is created as a new customer entity because the business had no reason to know about him during the first 44 years and some months of his life. Though Fred Smith live much longer, when the business is no longer interested in him as an entity, he ceases to exist for business purposes.
An entity type life-cycle is a description of what can happen during the lives of entities of one type.
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