ABSTRACT
The problem of relationship management has received great attention from researchers and practitioners in several sectors of the economy: public administration; social networks and many others. This chapter introduces common concepts and characteristics relying on relationship management could be used to build a meta-model that exploits the new concept of interaction type. It discusses the traditional Viable Systems Approach view that considers relation and interaction respectively as structural and systemic concepts. The interaction type is first introduced in its simplest form using an UML class diagram that points out its role when the observer view changes from structure to system and from system to structure. The hierarchical nature of interaction types is then discussed in order to show how complex relationships, that involve more parties at several interaction levels. A model of transactional environment is proposed in which a transaction type can be interpreted as a particular case of interaction type and a transaction as an ordered set of interactions.
