ISO/IEC 11179 Part 2: Classification Schemes

    Metadata Registries — Part 2: Classification Schemes

The revision of 11179 Part 2 is not an ISO standard because it is in draft status, a project of the ANSI/NCITS L8 committee.

Excerpts from the draft standard in this talk are copyright protected by ISO Editors aim at consistency with other standards: ISO 704 Terminology work – principles and methods ISO 11179 Parts 1,3,4, 5,6 ISO 1087 Part 2: Computational aids in terminology ISO standards for monolingual and multilingual thesauri ISO/IEC 19501-1:2001 UML Clarity goals: – Guidance should be practical, with useful distinctions, and the language should be translatable.

Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

What is a Classification Scheme?

  Clearly includes: Artifacts which support controlled vocabularies for definitions, formal specifications and descriptions – Taxonomies – Terminologies, Thesauri – Ontologies: Generalization hierarchies of concepts or classes  Linguistic Ontologies – –  Axiomatized Ontologies Keyword lists Data models Less obvious: Any Composite Element of a System – System documentation – – Mappings between data models Data types Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

Part of a registered Information System may be used as a Classification Scheme

 When a relationship is maintained between one of its parts and another administered item. – Examples: –  a class in a data model is derived from a registered data element originally defined within another model  a data model is generated from a cluster or subdomain of an ontology.

In practice: if you need classification scheme attributes for a diagram, documentation or value domain, you may register it as a classification scheme.

Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

Why Include Classification Schemes in a Metadata Registry?

  Improve metadata quality by managing use of controlled vocabularies for definitions Manage captured domain knowledge which persists independently of applications and IT trends, and is less compromised by such considerations as cost and performance. – The meaning of the sentence "a customer buys a book from a sales clerk" could be conveyed in a variety of knowledge and data representations:   UML class diagram or use case IDEF entity relationship diagram or process diagram  The formal specification standard Z, the logic programming language Prolog, KIF, Conceptual Graphs, or even a labelled sketch.

Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense



11179 Part 2 does not mandate utility or content

It provides a structure which supports the difficult work of semantic reconciliation, using 11179 authorities

’

s definitions, management of status, versions and

– Axiomatized ontologies represent an understanding of a part of the world related to an information system. They may include business rules, theories, and constraints, and serve as formal specifications for automatically generated database schema and applications.

– Linguistic ontologies may support natural language interfaces for queries of structured and unstructured data, extraction of information from text, and translation systems – Mappings between models are also models  Support heterogenous database access, mediators, agents, identification of re-usable components Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

Classification Scheme

  Definition: the descriptive information for an arrangement or division of objects into groups based on characteristics which the objects have in common.

 Examples: a key word list, a taxonomy, a data model, a network, an ontology. A list of terms might be taken from the "leaf level" of a taxonomy or from object classes in a data model.

Attributes:

classification_scheme_type_name

– Definition: the name of the type of classification scheme. (There is no standard list of structure types and it is possible that the type used to describe a scheme may vary).

 Other attributes are those of any administered item.

Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

Classification Scheme Item

 These represent individual items within Classification Schemes. They are not required to be recorded.

Attributes: – csi_type_name   Definition: the name of the type of classification scheme item.

Example: – Taxon term (if the value attribute is Drosophilae)  – Taxon identifier (if the value attribute is 5411) ( Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Species are levels, not item types) – csi_value    A designator of a classification scheme item Value should be unique within a classification scheme. Together with the administration_record_identifier, this provides a globally unique namespace for classification scheme items. Example: Drosophilae OR: 5411 Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

Classification Scheme Item Relationships

 – – – Classification_scheme_item_relationships are also not required to be recorded.

Each classification_scheme_item_relationship requires exactly two distinct classification_scheme_items and they must both be recorded. Examples:   Faculty is a specialization of Employee A Drug Order IS-A Pharmacy Order Component Attributes: – csi_item_relationship_type_description  Examples: – Broader Than / Narrower Than – Hyponym / Synonym / Hypernym – Subclass / Superclass Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

Classification_Scheme classification_scheme_administration_record [1..1] : Administration_Record classification_scheme_type_name [1..1] : String +containing

classification_scheme_membership

+contained in Classification_Scheme_Item csi_type_name [0..1] : String csi_value [0..1] : String +classifying +association +association

classification_scheme_item_relationship

Classification_Scheme_Item_Relationship csi_relationship_type_description [1..1] : String

administered_item_classification

+classified_by 0..n

Administration_Record

Classification Scheme Region

Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense

Thank you for your attention and hospitality!

  Reviews, experiences, issues and comments on 11179 Part 2 are very welcome.

Contact: [email protected]

 Some Related Conferences: – KAWS Knowledge Acquisition Workshop – KRDB Knowledge Representation and Databases – ICCS International Conference on Conceptual Structures – FOIS Formal Ontology in Information Systems Nancy Lawler U.S. Department of Defense