What is IMI
IMI(Infrastructure for Multilayer Interoperability) Common Vocabulary Framework is provided to describe common terms and their relationship in order to enhance interoperability of open data and Digital Government.
In IMI, terms are represented as concepts. The concepts are defined and organized to each other while words are associated to the concepts.
A concept is either a class concept or a property concept and they are connected to each other to denote some meaning. Words in texts and data labels in datasets can be interoperable by representing them as the concepts in IMI.
IMI also provides the Core Vocabulary including concepts commonly used and shared by domains. The Core Vocabulary consists of roughly 60 class concepts, 250 property concepts and words associated to them. The domain and application vocabularies can be defined as extensions of the Core vocabulary, i.e., concepts in them are defined as inherited ones from the concepts in the Core Vocabulary.
Domain and application vocabularies with the Core Vocabulary together work as a vocabulary for a specific domain or application.
IMI can realize interoperability of data among data providers, application developers, and users with small effort.
Data providers publish data by associating them with IMI Vocabulary, while application developers and users interpret data with the associated IMI Vocabulary.
The information for IMI usage in an individual case is defined as an information package called DMD (Data Model Description).
A DMD is provided for the individual use of IMI and consists of human readable explanation, the constraints for the specific use of concepts, data structure for application programs, and mapping between data structure and concepts in IMI. By defining and sharing DMDs, data providers can publish data without changes while application developers and users can understand meaning of data precisely.
The benefit of IMI Common Vocabulary Framework is, thus, to obtain higher interoperability of data without changing conventional data publishing and exchanging practices.
The current release is IMI Core Vocabulary version 2.4.2
IMI Core Vocabulary
IMI project is promoted by Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
and Information-Promotion Agency, Japan, based on Basic Act on the Advancement of Public and Private Sector Data Utilization.
