Use Cases for DefinedTerm

The following use cases were developed by the Datasets group.

The SchemaOrg type DefinedTerm is allowed in many places as property value.

In e.g. the life-sciences, there are a number of controlled vocabularies and ontologies, which are often used as source of the DefinedTerms. Many of them can be browsed and accessed through terminology and lookup services or portals.

For linked data applications it is sufficient for an entity with @type="DefinedTerm" to link to an @id pointing to the IRI of the referenced concept. In other cases, more information is needed to search and view defined term information without having to lookup external resources. Those use cases are the target of this profile. E.g., a domain-specific search engine can create faceted search based on the name property, like e.g. done in TeSS. Aforementioned terminology services also offer linking and query interfaces beyond IRIs as parameters.

Another possible use of a conformant DefinedTerm is to enable creating hyperlinks to other web ressources, e.g. https://bio.tools/t?inputDataFormatID=%22format_3244%22 or provide tool-tips if the description is provided.

It is not intended to duplicate the content and expressivity of powerful ontology representations and serialisations like OWL or RDF.