Welcome to ISO 5127

ISO 5127 provides a concept system and general vocabulary for the field of documentation within the whole information field. It has been created with a balanced representation of major work areas in mind: documentation, libraries, archives, media, museums, records management, conservation as well as legal aspects of documentation. The scope of the vocabulary provided in this document corresponds to that of ISO/TC 46: standardization of practices relating to libraries, documentation and information centres, publishing, archives, records management, museum documentation, indexing and abstracting services, and information science.

As a terminology standard, among the main functions it serves are the following:
— to be a quick one‐stop shop, a reference pool showing a comprehensive overview of the entirety of the terminology (terms) and its individual pieces in the field, also for ISO/TC 46 and its field of work;
— to provide an interrelated conceptual overview, based on the underlying elaborate concept system, of the field of information and documentation as a whole, thus creating a summary of main terminology of the field, for the use of ISO/TC 46, related Committees and the entire information community;
— to facilitate international communication both between countries and within international organizations, on all matters within the scope of this document; and so, at the same time (both national and international) between the individual professions and disciplines involved in the documentation field;
— to be at hand as a reference tool for questions as to individual items in the field and for ensuring the correct understanding of individual terms as they may be used in different places;
— to act, as a nucleus of validated terminology, as a reference point and for the establishing of national language versions (translations) of this terminology; so it would assist both in the exact understanding/interpretation of certain technical terms and in their translation and exchange between different languages;
— to provide, as much as is in its scope, solid foundational assistance in the teaching of “documentation”;
— to serve as a stock of precisely defined items (concepts) that are at hand when data elements for all sorts of information and documentation data exchange systems and networks are to be defined, agreed and machine‐implemented;
— to serve as a vocabulary pool for indexing, abstracting and cataloguing services covering, and active in, the field of documentation;
— to serve as the source and starting point for creating metadata, also keeping in mind the developments of linked data;
— to provide a pool, as a starting and reference point, for further and proper formalization of concepts into directly applicable IT‐conforming entities;
— to as well provide necessary material for future establishing of ontologies of parts of the documentation field or of the whole field, for more elaborate operation of automated IT processes;
— to maintain the connection to all classification systems that undertake, for any purpose, to classify and to order the field of documentation; through its own richly cross‐referenced structure, to serve as a first collection for the possible building of one or more thesauri of the field;
— to assist further study and scientific exploration of the field, and the sciences, of information and documentation.

In its approach to related concepts and their definitions through generic relations, and to, in a number of instances, connect entries through “See references” in the “Notes to entry”, ISO 5127 presents a slight look and feel in the direction of paving the way for a thesaurus application.

Maintenance of ISO 5127 as a SMART (Standards Machine Applicable, Readable and Transferable) standard

Traditional paper-based services and electronic reading services in formats such as PDF continue to be the main service for ISO International Standards and other international and domestic standards. These versions are mainly for human reading and cannot be understood and processed automatically by machines, seriously lagging behind the needs of the current information age.

As knowledge graph plays a more and more critical role in this artificial intelligence era, many research groups are trying to organize the knowledge in their domain into a machine-readable knowledge graph, which stores knowledge in triples.

Using the SKOS description scheme and CLSS solution to maintain the ISO 5127, it is easy to achieve the terminology acquisition goal of ISO 10241-1, and further to provide other more powerful functions:

1. Using SKOS to describe the ISO 5127 semantically, the implicit semantics in ISO 5127 can be explicitly revealed for machine understanding and reasoning, so that it can provide more convenient and intelligent knowledge service in the Semantic Web environment and the artificial intelligence era.

2. Developing the Web version of ISO 5127, which provides the users a free, open and shared service platform to search terms or browse hierarchies with a simple and intuitive interface, can promote its networked development and broad application.

3. The implementation of ISO 5127 Linked Data service can link various resources inside and outside ISO, providing users with new resource discovery and access services, so that the ISO international standards will better play the role of standardizing and disseminating knowledge in the AI age.

4. The realization of ISO 5127 Web Services enables interoperability between different systems or applications.

Quick Links:
Search terms or browse hierarchies online
Linked Data Service
Access the Web services
Suggest new terms

For more information about ISO 5127
Contact the ISO/TC 46 at: https://www.iso.org/committee/48750.html

Creator(s):

ISO/TC 46
NKOS Research Office, Shenzhen University