Structure of An ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registry
The ISO/IEC 11179 model is a result of two principles of semantic theory, combined with basic principles of data modelling.
The first principle from semantic theory is the thesaurus type relation between wider and more narrow (or specific) concepts, i.e. the wide concept "income" has a relation to the more narrow concept "net income".
The second principle from semantic theory is the relation between a concept and its representation, i.e. "buy" and "purchase" are the same concept even if different terms are used.
The basic principle of data modelling is the combination of an object class and a characteristic. For example, "Person - hair color".
When applied to data modelling, ISO/IEC 11179 combines a wide "concept" with an "object class" to form a more specific "data element concept". For example, the high-level concept "income" is combined with the object class "person" to form the data element concept "net income of person". Note that "net income" is more specific than "income".
The different possible representations of a data element concept are then described with the use of one or more data elements. Differences in representation may be a result of the use of synonyms or different value domains in different data sets in a data holding. A value domain is the permitted range of values for a characteristic of an object class. An example of a value domain for "sex of person" is "M = Male, F = Female, U = Unknown". The letters M, F and U are then the permitted values of sex of person in a particular data set.
The data element concept "monthly net income of person" may thus have one data element called "monthly net income of individual by 100 dollar groupings" and one called "monthly net income of person range 0-1000 dollars", etc., depending on the heterogeneity of representation that exists within the data holdings covered by one ISO/IEC 11179 registry. Note that these two examples have different terms for the object class (person/individual) and different value sets (a 0-1000 dollar range as opposed to 100 dollar groupings).
The result of this is a catalogue of sorts, in which related data element concepts are grouped by a high-level concept and an object class, and data elements grouped by a shared data element concept. Strictly speaking, this is not a hierarchy, even if it resembles one.
It is worth noting that ISO/IEC 11179 proper does not describe data as it is actually stored. There is no part of the model that caters to the description of physical files, tables and columns. All the ISO/IEC 11179 constructs are "semantic" as opposed to "physical" or "technical".
Since the standard has two main purposes (definition and exchange) the core object is the data element concept, since it defines a concept and, ideally, describes data independent of its representation in any one system, table, column or organisation.
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