Multiple Vocabulary Facility (MVF) Ontology
The MVF ontology consists of three components: - a core ontology corresponding to the MVF metamodel (this ontology) - an extension representing the subset of the ISO 1087 reference vocabulary used in other ISO standards for vocabulary representation, - an extension that incorporates additional vocabulary from ISO 1087 for terminology science. MVF also reuses several ontologies from the OMG Commons library for specific patterns, including designations, collections, and classifiers.
Evan Wallace, U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
The https://www.omg.org/spec/MVF/20230501/MultipleVocabularyFacility.rdf version of the ontology was modified to loosen constraints on restrictions on the number of names, descriptions, and URIs an MVF element can have to facilitate cases where the same exact term is duplicated across controlled vocabularies and are mapped using owl:sameAs, which occurs in certain pharmaceutical cases (e.g., across jurisdictions where the terms are identical but repeated, as in MEDdra terms that are repeated in the EMA SPOR controlled vocabularies, to reuse hasTextualName from Commons 1.2 (MVF11-13), to loosen the restriction on vocabulary entry, on property denotes, to make it optional (MVF11-18), to integrate new constructs from Commons 1.3, eliminating the dependencies on LCC (MVF11-21), to remove the inverse on isInVocabulary (MVF11-20), to add a descriptive reference property (MVF11-4), and to deprecate the abbreviation class (MVF11-17).
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group of individuals that share a natural language and have a shared set of terms used to express concepts in their domain of interest
We refer to a set of terms that is distinguished from general use of the natural language as a vernacular. The community may include people that share a profession, are members of the same enterprise or organization or are collaborating on a particular technology.
collection (by reference, or possibly inclusion) of vocabularies that share a set of MVFEntries
Each vocabulary is a container for vocabulary entries that each represent the association of a term in that vocabulary with one of the MVFEntries identified in that dictionary. A modeling environment may include multiple dictionaries, but they must address mutually exclusive concepts. Typically, one dictionary will address concepts of the modeling language metamodel, and another dictionary will address concepts of user-defined modeling elements.
abstract entity in a multiple vocabulary facility model or ontology
An MVF element corresponds roughly to an element in category theory, namely one that can be an object of any category, and to 'entity' in many top level ontologies.
Typically there will be exactly one URI, description, and name for a term, but issues arise when the same term is intentionally duplicated across controlled vocabularies, which happens from time to time in bioinformatics, for example.
Use the Dublin Core 'references' annotation for any relevant citations or other references, corresponding to the 'reference' property in the MVF metamodel.
ISO 1087 Terminology work and terminology science - Vocabulary, Second edition, 2019-09, clause 3.2.7
unit of knowledge created by a unique combination of characteristics
An MVF entry is linked to one or more model elements that represent that concept in the modeling environment.
Concepts [MVF entries] are not necessarily bound to particular natural languages. They are, however, influenced by the social or cultural background which often leads to different categorizations.
From an ISO 1087 perspective, this is the concept 'concept' as used and designated by the term 'concept' in terminology work. It is a very different concept from that designated by other domains such as industrial automation or marketing.
Note that instances of a class will all reference the same class name and will all have attributes and associations with the same names. It is possible that not every concept is mapped to an entry in every vocabulary, or that not all of the terms and definitions are associated with model elements in the active modeling environment.
classifier for the standing of a term within its vocabulary
set of representations of concepts (terms and definitions) for the language of a particular speech community that is expressed in a specified natural language
This representation does not address the ordering of imports, which may require an intervening class that has an attribute that is an ordinal number representing the ordering.
A speech community may create a vocabulary by specializing an existing vocabulary and overriding selected terms, adding terms for new concepts and incorporating the remaining terms and definitions of the existing vocabulary. This mechanism may be employed to introduce synonyms as the primary terms of the specializing community. Both vocabularies should be in the same natural language so that definitions remain meaningful.
element of a vocabulary (designation) that denotes at most one concept (MVF entry) in the context of that vocabulary
The definition and term(s) are expressed in the natural language associated with that vocabulary and the associated user community.
a set of consistent MVF dictionaries and vocabularies which can be activated in a modeling environment
is a shortened designation for a term that is used synonymously with that term in the context of a given vocabulary or dictionary
has a shortened designation used synonymously in the context of the given vocabulary or dictionary
has a more general MVF entry than the subject
indicates the applicable MVF entry from the active MVF workspace
This property will be implicitly updated when the current workspace changes.
links to any relevant resources that provide further information about the element
links a model element to the corresponding MVF entry (concept), providing a name and definition for that model element
There could be many of these in different dictionaries.
hasMVFEntry is a property used to relate an element in any model to a corresponding MVF entry. It corresponds to the property ElementEntry in the metamodel. That property has a UML Element in its domain, which cannot be modeled in the ontology.
has a more specialized MVF entry than the subject
has relevant reference that provides meaning but is not explicitly part of the vocabulary (i.e., document, web site, or other resource)
This property is string valued as the reference need not be dereferenceable at a URL.
associates a rating with respect to readiness or acceptability for usage with a vocabulary or MVF entry
has a designation (term) in this vocabulary
whether the term for this vocabulary entry is an shortened form of another
is the best term to use in the context of the vocabulary for some concept
The preferred flag is used to select a term (vocabulary entry) if there are multiple vocabulary entries (i.e., synonyms) available to map to a given model element in the current context.