ISO/IEC 11179

ISO/IEC 11179 (formally known as the ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registry (MDR) standard) is an international standard for representing metadata for an organization in a Metadata Registry.

Intended purpose

Today, organizations often want to exchange data quickly and precisely between computer systems using enterprise application integration technologies. Completed transactions are also often transferred to separate data warehouse and business rules systems with structures designed to support data for analysis. The industry de facto standard model for data integration platforms is the Common Warehouse Model (CWM). Data integration is often also solved as a data, rather than a metadata problem, with the use of so called master data. ISO/IEC 11179 claims that it is a standard for metadata-driven exchange of data in an heterogeneous environment, based on exact definitions of data.

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 "gender of person" is "M = Male, F = Female, U = Unknown". The letters M, F and U are then the permitted values of gender of person in a particular dataset.

The data element concept "monthly net income of person" may thus have one data element called "monthly net income of individual by 1000 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.

In this way, ISO/IEC 11179 both creates a catalogue of sorts, in which related concepts are grouped by a high-level concept and an object class, and data elements that are related conceptually are grouped by a shared data element concept. This results in a hierarchy of sorts, even if it is not strictly a hierarchy, but rather two levels of one to many relations. (A concept may have one or more data element concepts and a data element concept may have one or more data elements).

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".

From the description above it should be clear that the core object of ISO/IEC 11179 is the data element concept, which, ideally, describes data independent of its representation in any one system, table, column or organisation.

However, the data element may also be viewed as fundamental, since much of the model focuses on the registering of data elements, and they form the basis for the description of the underlying data.

Structure of the ISO/IEC 11179 standard

The standard consists of six parts:

• Part 1 - Framework
• Part 2 - Classification
• Part 3 - Registry metamodel and basic attributes
• Part 4 - Formulation of data definitions
• Part 5 - Naming and identification principles
• Part 6 - Registration

Part 1 explains the purpose of each part. Part 3 specifies the metamodel that defines the registry. The other parts specify various aspects of the use of the registry.

Overview of 11179 Data Element

The Data element is foundational concept in an ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry. The purpose of the registry is to maintain a semantically precise structure of data elements.

Each Data element in an ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry:

• should be registered according to the Registration guidelines (11179-6)
• will be uniquely identified within the register (11179-5)
• should be named according to Naming and Identification Principles (11179-5) See Data element name
• should be defined by the Formulation of Data Definitions rules (11179-4) See Data element definition and
• may be classified in a Classification Scheme (11179-2) See Classification scheme

Data elements that store "Codes" or enumerated values must also specify the semantics of each of the code values with precise definitions.

Adoption of 11179 Standards

The poor reception of ISO/IEC 11179 in commercial data warehousing and data integration software suggests that it may not fill real world business needs. Despite the rising demand for efficient data integration solutions, Oracle, the only major commercial supporter of ISO/IEC 11179 has canceled its support for this standard (see below)!

The reason that ISO/IEC 11179 does not seem to fill any real world commercial requirements for data exchange is probably that it is a purely theoretical construct, based on semantic theory. It may also be the case that a result of this theoretical approach is a model that is overly complex to understand and work-demanding to implement.

The spread of ISO/IEC 11179 has been more successful in the public sector. However, it is unclear if this is due to different requirements for data exchange in the public sector, since its spread seems to follow the sphere of influence of the participants in the development of the standard, i.e. the reception is with U.S. government agencies, and with a limited group of national and international statistical organisations.

Organizations such as the United Nations and the US Government are large users of 11179 standards.

11179 is strongly recommended on the U.S. government's XML website. US Government's XML web site.

Extensions to the ISO/IEC 11179 standard

Although the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry is a complex standard comprising several hundreds of pages, there are users that are attempting to extend these standards to meet various challenges. For example the XMDR project states its purpose as being: ...concerned with the development of improved standards and technology for storing and retrieving the semantics of data elements, terminologies, and concept structures in metadata registries.

Examples of ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registries

The following metadata registries state that they follow ISO/IEC 11179 guidelines although there have been no formal third party tests developed to test for metadata registry compliance.

• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare - Metadata Online Registry (METeOR)
• US Department of Justice - Global Justice XML Data Model GJXDM
• US Environmental Protection Agency - Environmental Data Registry
• US Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK)
• US National Cancer Institute - Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR)
• US National Information Exchange Model NIEM
• Minnesota Department of Education Metadata Registry (K-12 Data)
• Minnesota Department of Revenue Property Taxation (Real Estate Transactions)

Metadata registry vendor tools that claim ISO/IEC 11179 compliance

Listed alphabetically:

• Data Foundations Metadata Registry
• Oracle used to offer Enterprise Metadata Manager (EMM) through their consulting practice but the service is no longer listed on the company web site.

Note that there are no independent agencies that certify ISO/IEC 11179 compliance.

See also

• Data dictionary
• Data reference model
• Global Justice XML Data Model
• National Information Exchange Model
• Representation term
• Semantic Web
• Universal Data Element Framework
• METeOR
• Metadata standards

References

• ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee on Metadata Standards Web Site
• 11179 Document List
• ISO/IEC 11179-1:2004 Metadata registries (MDR) - Part 1: Framework
• ISO/IEC 11179-2:2005 Metadata registries (MDR) - Part 2: Classification
• ISO/IEC 11179-3:2003 Metadata registries (MDR) - Part 3: Registry metamodel and basic attributes
• ISO/IEC 11179-4:2004 Metadata registries (MDR) - Part 4: Formulation of data definitions
• ISO/IEC 11179-5:2005 Metadata registries (MDR) - Part 5: Naming and identification principles
• ISO/IEC 11179-6:2005 Metadata registries (MDR) - Part 6: Registration
• Extended Business XML Naming Conventions
• A (non-normative, unofficial) OWL ontology for ISO/IEC 11179-3 version 2. Authored by Kevin D. Keck (kdkeck@lbl.gov). Last modified 2005-Jan-21