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openWEMI cookbook

OpenWEMI is a framework for building ontologies — structured vocabularies — for creative domains. Broadly, a structured vocabulary consists of a set of terms for concepts or things, where each term will have a definition, including its properties and relationships to other terms. It is built on the concepts of work, expression, manifestation and item (or "WEMI") which were originally developed for bibliographic models, but can be applied more broadly. OpenWEMI is intended to be broadly applicable to creative domains where concepts need to be defined and related.

To that end, there are specific technical differences between OpenWEMI and its bibliographic roots. For example, openWEMI does not require that the concepts work, expression, manifestation and item be distinct — or appear at all.

A wrinkle: the point of building a structured vocabulary of more or less abstract concepts within a creative domain is so that you can use the resulting vocabulary to describe and organize instances of those concepts, such as real objects (including less tangible objects like a dataset). OpenWEMI can also be used directly to describe and organize real objects without building a domain-specific vocabulary. Either is OK, but it's important that you keep the two things — concepts and objects — straight.

OpenWEMI can be used from several different starting points. It can be used to structure an existing glossary, or to build a new vocabulary from scratch. It does not require adopting every concept or relationship in openWEMI if some parts are not needed for a particular domain or use case. It does not restrict the vocabulary to a single concept for each concept in openWEMI.

For example, a vocabulary for physics research might include the separate terms "theoretical model" and "practical experiment", both representing the openWEMI concept of "work". On the other hand, the openWEMI concept of "expression" might be superfluous, and therefore omitted from the vocabulary.

You might also be building a structured vocabulary from a soup of too many terms and concepts. In this case, openWEMI can hep you select which terms are most useful for building a structured vocabulary for your creative domain.

Finally, you might be trying to associate the concepts in two different vocabularies, either of which may or may not be based on WEMI principles, and may or may not be under your control. OpenWEMI includes terms which you can use as a basis for defining this kind of relationship. To be clear, these relationship terms can be used when building a new vocabulary, or with two existing vocabularies.

(See Use cases for these and more options.)

Like openWEMI itself, this cookbook is not intended to be prescriptive. If you happen to be defining an ontology for quilting, for example, your design might be similar to the example given below, or it might be quite different.