Controlled Vocabulary Authoring
Design, govern, and evolve your classification structure.
Provides an editorial workspace for building and maintaining controlled vocabularies — taxonomies, ontologies, code lists, schemas. Teams propose terms, debate scope, version releases, and gate changes through approval. Every downstream organise primitive consumes what this produces. Without it, schemas calcify or fragment into source-system dialects.
Shape
Operational dimensions
Person and system work side-by-side.
Fires when a user asks.
Light state; replaceable any time.
Emits to external systems; does not read them.
Inputs
- term proposals from domain SMEs
- existing vocabulary version
- governance rules and approval chain
- mapping requests from downstream systems
Outputs
- published vocabulary version (terms + relationships + definitions)
- change log with proposal history
- deprecation map for retired terms
- machine-readable schema artefact (JSON-LD, SKOS, OWL)
Mechanism
Authors and governs a controlled structuring artefact — taxonomy, ontology, classification scheme, code list, schema — including its terms, relationships, versions, and approval workflow.
Why this is a primitive
Cannot be decomposed: the design-debate-version-publish-deprecate lifecycle of structuring vocabularies is a single editorial operation. It is upstream of every other organise primitive (they all consume a schema) and never instantiates anything itself. Strip out the authoring loop and downstream organise primitives have nothing to map TO.
Where it shows up
Related primitives
Tags
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