Glossary · Information types and subjects

iiRDS InformationSubject

Also known as: information subject, information subjects, subject, content subject

In iiRDS (intelligent information Request and Delivery Standard), an InformationSubject describes what content is about — its thematic characteristic, such as safety, technical data or conformity. Information units are linked to one or more subjects with iirds:has-subject.

iiRDS term
Ontology
Information architecture

In one sentence

An iiRDS InformationSubject says what content is about — safety, technical data, conformity or formalities — so units can be filtered by theme.

Example

A hazard warning about hot surfaces is linked with iirds:has-subject to iirds:Warning, a WarningMessage subject within the Safety group.

How it applies

Technical documentation: Subjects group content by theme across document boundaries. iirds:TechnicalData covers properties such as dimensions and connection voltage, iirds:TechnicalOverview covers circuit diagrams and software interfaces, iirds:Formality covers contact information, product identification and scope of delivery.
Safety: The iirds:Safety group holds instances such as iirds:IntendedUse, iirds:ForeseeableMisuse and iirds:SafetyInstruction. Its subclass iirds:WarningMessage carries the signal-word levels iirds:Danger, iirds:Warning, iirds:Caution and iirds:Notice, so a delivery portal can find every warning of a given level.
MedTech and compliance: iirds:Conformity covers applicable standards, declarations of conformity, risk assessments and technical reports — the content an auditor asks for first.
AI and retrieval: Subjects let a retrieval system cluster and filter content by theme. Filtering on the subject Safety makes sure an assistant never answers a maintenance question without the warnings that belong to it.

Subject vs. topic type

A topic type says what kind of text a unit is (a task, a concept). A subject says what it is about (safety, technical data). A single safety instruction can be a task and have the subject Safety. In the iiRDS schema, InformationSubject is itself a subclass of InformationType.

In RDF

Shown in Turtle for readability — inside a package, metadata.rdf is written in RDF/XML.

@prefix iirds: <http://iirds.tekom.de/iirds#> .

<https://example.com/iirds/warning-hot-surface> a iirds:Fragment ;
    iirds:title "Hot surface"@en ;
    iirds:has-subject iirds:Warning .