Preface:

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).

This Standard supersedes CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC 11179-00 (adoption of ISO/IEC 11179-4:1995). At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 11179-4:2004 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.

Scope:

This part of ISO/IEC 11179 specifies requirements and recommendations for constructing definitions for data and metadata. Only semantic aspects of definitions are addressed; specifications for formatting the definitions are deemed unnecessary for the purposes of ISO/IEC 11179. While especially applicable to the content of metadata registries as specified in ISO/IEC 11179-3, this part of ISO/IEC 11179 is useful broadly for developing definitions for data and metadata.

These definitional requirements and recommendations pertain to formulating definitions for data elements and other types of data constructs such as entity types, entities, relationships, attributes, object types (or classes), objects, composites, code entries, metadata items, and the data referred to by XML tags.