Controlled Vocabulary Page

Rationale and Discussion

During our first F2F meeting in May (link), we had a series of interesting discussions. The diverse background of participants resulted in a mixture of various terminologies, acronyms and jargon being used, and people asking 'what do you mean by that', ' we use another term for that' etc

The need for a CV (controlled vocabulary) became obvious, however the task is vast. Virtually every word that we use in discourse needs a definition, if we are to be exact in our communication.

The purpose of the EIIF controlled vocabulary is twofold

- reduce ambiguity in verbal communication (increasing efficiency of discourse) - reduce semantic inconsistencies in our model/framework/schemas

The scope of such a CV is virtually unlimited, however we should take this task 'step by step', thus we start from defining the words that we use in each task/deliverable.

Each word used in our schemas/documentation should correspond to an element name/value in our final schema recommendation, thus becoming a Label, or a candidate for a Label in our system.

Labels should be meaningful, correct, unique.

'Method': We select words in use during any given phase of the EIIF development, and note

a) definitions in use by international 'standard' bodies of reference (and declare the source where they come from) b) alternative/updated definitions in use by community of practice c) meaning of the term in our EIIF framework

After analysing the above definitions, we may

1- adopt a version already in use 
2= modify/improve the definition in use to suit our cases
3 - map the terms to other terms they are related to (synonyms for examples)
4 - change the Label if after the analysis above it turns out a better word exists for the same thing
5 - 'freeze' the definitions after some level of consensus has been reached, until the next revision

3W CV