IMI: A Common Vocabulary Framework for Open Government Data

Making meanings of terms used in government systems exchangeable is important to enhance semantic interoperability between systems and promote use of open government data. IMI is an interoperability framework for digital government and open government data in Japan. The IMI common vocabulary framework which is a part of IMI since 2013 aims to provide a mechanism for sharing meanings of terms and relationships between terms to enhance interoperability. This paper describes the current status of the IMI common vocabulary framework to share our experiences and knowledge from the development in five years. At first we illustrate the IMI common vocabulary and its core vocabulary which includes a basic set of terms used in data or referred from existing data to share meanings. Then we describe specifications of components in the common vocabulary framework like data exchange formats, notations and a package system. As the IMI common vocabulary has been already used in various areas, we also introduce its deployment support and real use cases of the common vocabulary framework.