Glossary · Extensions

Proprietary iiRDS extension

Also known as: proprietary extension, custom extension, company-specific vocabulary

In iiRDS (intelligent information Request and Delivery Standard), a proprietary extension adds company- or project-specific classes, instances and properties to the iiRDS vocabulary. Its classes must be subclasses of iiRDS classes, its properties subproperties of iiRDS properties, and it may only use RDF and RDFS.

iiRDS term
Ontology
Information architecture

In one sentence

A proprietary iiRDS extension adds company-specific classes, instances and properties that stay processable because they build on iiRDS classes.

Example

A manufacturer adds the role “Certified biomedical technician” as an instance of iirds:Role and the property has-maintenance-interval as a subproperty of iirds:has-planning-time.

How it applies

The rules: Proprietary classes, instances and properties are registered in the defining party's own namespace. Classes are subclasses (or equivalent classes) of iiRDS classes, instances belong to iiRDS classes or proprietary subclasses, and properties are subproperties that respect the domain and range of the iiRDS property they extend.
Packaging: All proprietary extensions used in a package must be included in its metadata.rdf. The component tree of a product, for example, is a proprietary extension and travels with the content.
OWL and product ontologies: Extensions may use only RDF and RDFS. A richer OWL ontology is not iiRDS-compliant, but can be kept outside the package and linked with rdfs:seeAlso.
AI and governance: Because every custom term sits under a standard class or property, a consumer that does not know the extension still understands roughly what it means — an AI system can treat an unknown role as a qualification rather than as noise.

Proprietary extension vs. external classification

A proprietary extension adds new vocabulary to iiRDS. An external classification only records a code from another system that has no IRIs. The specification forbids using external classifications in place of proprietary extensions.

In RDF

Adapted from the extension examples in the iiRDS specification. Shown in Turtle for readability — inside a package, metadata.rdf is written in RDF/XML.

@prefix iirds: <http://iirds.tekom.de/iirds#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .

<https://example.com/iirds/ext#CertifiedBiomedicalTechnician> a iirds:Role ;
    rdfs:label "Certified biomedical technician"@en .

<https://example.com/iirds/ext#has-maintenance-interval> a rdf:Property ;
    rdfs:subPropertyOf iirds:has-planning-time ;
    rdfs:domain iirds:InformationUnit ;
    rdfs:range iirds:MaintenanceInterval .