Extending a vocabulary for a revision of a canonical model

In this use case, a community has developed a “canonical data model” that provides a reference format as a basis for sharing data between partners or applications. The developers of this model are extending it to support new concepts and business processes. They collect references for terms and definitions for the new concepts being added to the canonical model. Some of the sources have machine readable vocabularies available via SKOS rdf file. Others have only text or human readable web content. The model developers choose terms and definitions to add to the Model Dictionary from a number of sources and would like to have references to text sources and links to machine readable sources included in the vocabulary.

• Ability to have a Model Dictionary with its supporting Vocabularies as well as one or more Domain Vocabularies loaded and active in a workspace for browsing, searching, and linking.
• Ability to link Model Dictionary entries and/or Model Vocabulary entries to Domain Vocabulary entries.
• Ability to annotate entries with references to their source (text or machine readable)

• The Model Dictionary is the MVFDictionary linking elements in the canonical model with Terms and Definitions to display for its model elements.
• A Model Vocabulary contains the Terms and Definitions used for the Model Dictionary and is edited by the community maintaining the model.
• Domain Vocabularies are resources imported from some machine readable form to provide reference terms and definitions for domain concepts relevant to the model.

• The group developing the model is expanding the scope of their standard. Thus new concepts will be added to the model that will need appropriate terms and definitions.
• A standard developer (MVF user) researches the new area and finds that concepts in the extension to the standard are defined in a mix of machine readable reference vocabularies and more traditional text references (papers or web links).
• The user imports the machine readable vocabulary file containing the terms and definitions that he wants into his MVF facility. This creates a new MVFDictionary for all the concepts in the reference vocabulary and one or more Vocabularies in the Workspace. [there should probably be a parameters to the import operation that allow the user to specify which languages will be supported by the import and thus what vocabularies will be created.][There is a question as to whether or not to create a separate MVFDictionary for the reference vocabularies imported or just use the model MVFDictionary.]
• For each concept, the user will indicate the VocabularyEntry to add to the model Dictionary and have the tool add a corresponding MVFEntry to the reference MVFDictionary and to the model vocabularies. The MVFEntry would have the same externalReference as the entry in the reference dictionary.