Glossary · Information units

iiRDS InformationUnit

Also known as: information unit, InformationUnit

In iiRDS (intelligent information Request and Delivery Standard), InformationUnit is the abstract base class for every piece of intelligent information that carries metadata. It is never used on its own: each information unit is a Document, a Topic, a Fragment or a Package.

iiRDS term
Ontology
Information architecture

In one sentence

iiRDS InformationUnit is the abstract base class for all metadata-bearing content; every unit is a Document, Topic, Fragment or Package.

Example

A maintenance topic on replacing an air filter is typed as iirds:Topic and is therefore an information unit. Metadata such as product variant, lifecycle phase and required qualification is attached to this unit — not to the file that stores its text.

In-depth wiki articleiiRDS InformationUnit: the abstract base class for metadata-bearing content

How it applies

Technical documentation: Because metadata sits on the information unit, a content delivery portal can filter the same content by product, audience or lifecycle phase without copying files.
Safety: Safety-related metadata is assigned per unit, so a portal can collect every safety-relevant unit for a product in one query instead of searching through complete manuals.
Semantic web: The specification requires every information unit to have an IRI and forbids blank nodes. Each unit is therefore an addressable resource that other RDF data — a product catalog, a service ticket — can link to.
AI and retrieval: Information units give retrieval systems pre-labelled chunks. The metadata supplies the context (product, variant, audience) that a language model would otherwise have to guess from the text.

InformationUnit vs. InformationObject

An information unit is one concrete piece of content in one language and one revision. An InformationObject groups the information units that say the same thing in different languages or revisions. Each unit points to its information object with iirds:is-version-of.

In RDF

Generators must not type anything as iirds:InformationUnit directly; they always use a subclass. 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/replace-air-filter> a iirds:Topic .
<https://example.com/iirds/operating-manual> a iirds:Document .