Questions
We want to be able to use a vocabulary term (especially for flat vocabularies that are basically enumeration values) in fields of a form (e.g., for the responsible department or person on a Loan). This raises the question of whether, how, and where, we should maintain information that relates the vocabulary to a given entity and/or field. We need such information if we wanted to find all uses of some vocabulary item, across the entire application.
- The dumb and brittle approach is to hard code the search to check all the fields where it is used.
- Another approach is to model all uses of vocabulary like RDF as a relationship. This makes broad searching easy, but it will likely slow down structured search, and somewhat complicates the model (compared to a direct reference from the entity schema).
- Yet another approach is to describe where the vocabulary can be used, allowing for a reflection-like mechanism that search can use to construct field-based search through an entity. This makes the main information modeling simpler, but makes the search model pretty complex.