The purpose of the Data Element entity is to identify and describe all pieces of information used by the company's applications.
A Data Element is a unit of data, considered as 'elementary' during at least one stage in the development of a project.
During project analysis, the information 'Date of operation' can be traced and later, during implementation, it can be broken down into year, month and day of operation. Each one of these four basic units of data is defined as a Data Element: