Monolithic vs Modular Taxonomy/Ontology

Hello.
As DPV continues to grow, we're reaching a stage where there is a 
noticeable impact in terms of personal data categories and other 
concepts. The approach to rename personal data category or other 
non-data concepts can only work so many times, and will eventually cause 
confusion in adopters. What are potential solutions for this?

For example, (i) Certification as Personal Data and (ii) Certification 
as Organisational Measure. We resolved this by renaming (i) to 
ProfessionalCertification. This measure cannot always be used.

Another example, (i) Location as personal data category, and (ii) 
Location for indicating personal data storage. We resolved this by 
avoiding (i) in not providing hasStorage property with any range and 
defining StorageLocation.

Problem if we define both concepts using same label or IRI: Any time 
someone wants to specify a Certification or Location for data storage or 
transfer, it is defined as personal data as well, or the label causes 
confusion and they use the wrong concept. Not a good design IMHO.

Solutions:
1) Keep only the 'top-tier' personal data taxonomy in DPV and move 
others outside into a dpv-personal-data extension. This is my preferred 
approach because it keeps concepts in other modules (E.g. technical 
measures) with the commonly used words without overlap with personal 
data. AFAIK the issue only exists with overlap between personal data 
categories and other concepts.

2) Keep only the 'top-tier' concepts for all modules and move other 
concepts outside into specific taxonomies. Not my preferred option 
because it means adopters need to import a lot of vocabularies to get 
commonly used concepts e.g. technical measures.

3) Keep concepts as they are, with same label for multiple concepts in 
different modules, but different IRI. E.g. pd_Location for personal data 
categories and Location for the generic concept.

4) Something else you propose.

IMHO Backward compatibility is not as important as effective design and 
correctness for real-world usage. We're still figuring out what things 
are needed and how we should provide them. When we reach v1, it means 
milestone and stability.

FYI SPECIAL had modular vocabularies: 
https://specialprivacy.ercim.eu/vocabs/ with distinct IRIs.

Regards,
-- 
---
Harshvardhan J. Pandit, Ph.D
Research Fellow
ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin
https://harshp.com/

Received on Thursday, 29 July 2021 10:19:08 UTC