iiRDS Package: the information unit that describes a complete delivery

Example

A manufacturer of palletizing robots ships documentation for model X200 to a customer's service portal. The authoring system exports one file, machine-x200_en.iirds. Inside, META-INF/metadata.rdf contains a single iirds:Package with the IRI https://example.com/iirds/packages/machine-x200, iirds:iiRDSVersion "1.3" and the title "X200 documentation". The operating manual is an iiRDS Document; around 400 service procedures are topics, and warnings inside them are fragments. The gripper supplier's documentation arrives as a nested package, declared in the parent metadata as a second iirds:Package that points to the parent with iirds:is-part-of-package.

How it applies

Technical documentation

The Package is the anchor for everything a delivery says about itself. A content delivery portal reads it first to check the iiRDS version and variant, then imports the bundled units. Title, language and revision on the Package help editors and portals tell successive deliveries of the same documentation apart.

Migration

Until iiRDS 1.2, a nested package was referenced through iirds:has-rendition pointing to the nested ZIP archive. From iiRDS 1.3, omitting that relation is recommended, and Consumers are advised to ignore it; content is read from the nested package's own metadata. Generators migrating older exports should update this pattern and set iirds:iiRDSVersion to "1.3".

MedTech

For handover of documentation for a specific device, iiRDS/H mandates metadata on the Package: at least one party with the role Creator whose vCard names an organization. Combined with PDF/A documents, the Package makes the delivery identifiable by manufacturer. Using iiRDS/H does not in itself demonstrate regulatory compliance.

AI and retrieval

For an ingestion pipeline, the Package is the provenance record. Storing its IRI, version and revision with every indexed chunk lets a retrieval system trace an answer back to the exact delivery, and replace all chunks of a package when a newer revision arrives.

Package vs. Document vs. ZIP archive

Concept	What it is	Where it lives
iiRDS Package	Information unit describing the whole delivery	One instance in metadata.rdf
iiRDS Document	One deliverable for an audience and purpose	Any number per package
iiRDS ZIP archive	The physical .iirds file	Not an RDF resource

Metadata about products, audiences or lifecycle phases normally sits on the documents and topics; the Package holds metadata about the delivery as a whole.

In RDF

A minimal Package with one document that declares its membership. Shown in Turtle for readability; inside a package, metadata.rdf is written in RDF/XML.

@prefix iirds: <http://iirds.tekom.de/iirds#> .

<https://example.com/iirds/packages/machine-x200> a iirds:Package ;
    iirds:iiRDSVersion "1.3" ;
    iirds:title "X200 documentation" .

<https://example.com/iirds/operating-manual> a iirds:Document ;
    iirds:is-part-of-package <https://example.com/iirds/packages/machine-x200> .

In topic-based authoring and modular architectures

In topic-based authoring, a publication is assembled from reusable modules, often through a DITA map. The iiRDS Package is the delivery-side counterpart: one export bundles the modules as topics and fragments, with their metadata, and the Package describes that bundle. A map is not converted into the Package; a map-level deliverable is usually modeled as a Document. In modular delivery architectures, each package is an independently versioned unit. Suppliers deliver their own packages, a machine builder nests them, and a portal replaces a whole package when a new revision arrives, without touching the others.