Open APIs

Hi, We are working on a capability for a telecom operator where Primary subscriber (John) can add othes subscribers (Smith, Adam) to his household and assign a relationship label to each - spouse, parent, child, sibling.

The managed connections (Smith, Adam) may be prepaid, postpaid, broadband, or DTH subscribers. They do not necessarily share a billing account with John. The relationship is purely a personal/household identity label - it does not affect billing, provisioning, or commercial terms.

The Question:
Should this relationship be stored at:

Option A - Customer level (TMF629)
On the primary subscriber's Customer.relatedParty[] with role = "managedAccount" and a characteristic[relationshipType = "friend"]:

------------------------------
Ajay
------------------------------

Constraint you stated 

1. Smith & Adam may not share a billing account with John
2. Relationship must not affect billing
3. Prepaid / Postpaid / Broadband / DTH mix

Putting a "spouse / parent / child" label on an Account would overload a commercial object with identity semantics - a classic anti-pattern that leaks into billing extracts, revenue reports, and dunning logic.

Why TMF629 (Customer) is correct ??

TMF629 represents the party engaged in a business relationship with the operator - i.e., the person/identity view, independent of what they buy or how they pay.

Household, family, and personal relationships are attributes of IDENTITY. They persist even if John churns a service, switches from postpaid to prepaid, or closes a billing account.

In TMF629 we can model this via the relatedParty construct (or, more purely, delegate to TMF632 Party Management which owns PartyRelationship)

// On John's Customer resource
{
  "id": "cust-john-001",
  "name": "John",
  "relatedParty": [
    {
      "id": "cust-smith-044",
      "name": "Smith",
      "role": "spouse",          // household label
      "@referredType": "Customer"
    },
    {
      "id": "cust-adam-088",
      "name": "Adam",
      "role": "child",
      "@referredType": "Customer"
    }
  ]
}