The client intake produces a graph of people, orgs, and things. That is not yet a graph of a business. A business is patterns of exchange over time. REA (Resource, Event, Agent) is the smallest vocabulary that captures those patterns. William McCarthy introduced the model in 1982; ISO/IEC 15944-4 formalized it for interoperability. We use it as one of two meta-ontologies every ShurIQ engagement composes against.
Five REA classes carry the grammar. An Economic Agent is a party that participates. An Economic Resource is something of value that flows. An Economic Event is a moment when a resource moves. A Commitment is a promise to perform a future event. An Exchange is the give-and-receive pair that closes a transaction. Every stakeholder in an intake graph is one of those five things or is silent about them. Making the choice explicit turns a stakeholder list into a ledger.
REA lives in ShurIQ as an OKF meta-ontology bundle. Every client concept can declare shuriq_rea_type: EconomicAgent (or Event, Resource, Commitment, Exchange) in its frontmatter. That one line is the join. The client's Josh Nelson concept and REA's Economic Agent concept now share a vocabulary an agent can walk. Ten client concepts with REA typings produce ledger-shaped prose without a human bridging the gap.
How to apply it. After the intake, walk the stakeholder list and give every entry an shuriq_rea_type. If a stakeholder does not fit any of the five classes, that is a signal about the intake, not about REA. Update the intake, do not stretch the class. The next post is BMC, the second meta-ontology, and where the two typings pull orthogonal readings out of the same node.