Introduction

This part of ISO/IEC 11179 contains both principles and rules. Principles establish the premises on which the rules are based. Registry users may enforce rules as an application of this part of ISO/IEC 11179.

A naming convention is a convention (a set of rules) about names. Many naming conventions have much in common, whether it is defining a method of specifying names for common usage across application systems, or developing an organization's internal policy on the choice of XML tags for data interchange. A naming convention may be based on principles. In addition, it may contain formal and informal inputs, such as guidelines, recommendations, company policies, programming conventions, specifications, procedures, and so on. The purpose of this part of ISO/IEC 11179 is to describe and specify these common features of naming conventions. This part of ISO/IEC 11179 is intended to have broad applicability, including areas outside of Metadata Registries.

The goal of any naming convention is to allow development of names for items that have maximum clarity and transparency of meaning, combined with concision, demanding minimal effort of interpretation by the end user, subject to the constraints of the system under which the items are processed. A naming convention can be used to form names by which information about the data is expressed, in a simplified but still understandable grammar compared to natural language rules. Ideally, the names resemble summaries of the formal definition of the information being named.

In a metadata registry, one name may be designated as the “registry name,” derived by describing the content of a metadata item in a structured way, using a set of rules, i.e. by application of a formalized naming convention. Other names for the same metadata entity may occur in any context. For example, these may be

— software system names,
— programming language names,
— report header names,
— data interchange (e.g. XML) names, and
— names in other natural languages.

Names may have varying levels of rigor applied to their formation and usage. The collection and display of all names used by any single metadata item can be a major benefit of a metadata registry. The process of deriving names from concept systems and arranging semantic components with a naming convention forms a set of consistent, meaningful registry names. Names from other contexts, which may or may not have been formed with naming conventions, and therefore may have little or no semantic content, are collected and related to the registry name, thus, contributing in a valuable way to enterprise data management.

Edition 3 of ISO/IEC 11179‑3 uses the term designation in reference to most metamodel items except for the classes Namespace and Naming Convention. The designations for these classes were adopted in deference to commonly accepted usage. This part of ISO/IEC 11179 will continue to use the term name for constructs that, for purposes of this part of ISO/IEC 11179, are interchangeable with designation.

NOTE Items from the metamodel described in Edition 3 of ISO/IEC 11179‑3 are italicized in this part of ISO/IEC 11179. Most multi-word designations also contain underscores between words in ISO/IEC 11179‑3; the underscores have been omitted in this part of ISO/IEC 11179 for readability.

The naming principles and rules described in this part of ISO/IEC 11179 apply primarily to names of concepts, data element concepts, conceptual domains, data elements, and value domains, but can be extended to any registry content. Differing naming conventions may be applied to different sets of designatable items. This part of ISO/IEC 11179 should be used in conjunction with those which establish rules and procedures for attributing, classifying, defining, and registering items1.

This part of ISO/IEC 11179 may be used for applications that are unrelated to ISO/IEC 11179‑3, i.e. this part of ISO/IEC 11179 has broad applicability for use in describing naming conventions for almost any need or purpose. The same principles apply.

In Annex A, all of the examples are given with English terminologies. However, there is an intention that those rules be effective in other natural languages, even in those languages that use ideographs such as Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, when the terminologies used in the name are controlled properly. Annex B contains a version of the rules for Asian languages.

It is out of scope of the naming rules to establish semantic equivalence of names among different languages. Naming must be supplemented by other methods such as ontologies or controlled vocabularies in establishing semantic equivalence.

This part of ISO/IEC 11179 may be applied to ISO/IEC 11179‑3, i.e. describing naming conventions associated with designations of designatable items and other features of the metamodel. The following are examples of designations in the metamodel: the designation of a data element (class name: Designation; attribute: sign); the designation of classification scheme name; etc. Annex C contains a Concordance Table relating items in this part of ISO/IEC 11179 to items in ISO/IEC 11179‑3.

This part of ISO/IEC 11179 does not make requirements on any specific set of conventions, e.g. specific semantic, syntactic, or lexical requirements for names.

BS ISO/IEC 11179-5:2015

Information technology. Metadata registries (MDR) - Naming principles

Current, Under Review

Published:

31 Mar 2015