Quality management · The specification · Element
The characteristics
What is being specified, and which of those actually matter.
The part
What it is
Critical characteristics — those affecting function, safety or fit — should be distinguished from the rest, because they warrant different control.
Specifications accumulate characteristics over time and rarely lose any, which is worth periodic pruning.
The smallest level
The attributes it carries
Each attribute is one of the framework’s shared types. What a date is, and how it is written, is defined once for the whole model — the note here says what it means in this particular place.