Building your base taxonomy

Overview

Your base taxonomy defines the core set of types that are used to describe services and models. They're the building blocks that form the basis of your organisation's taxonomy.

Think of your taxonomy as a shared vocabulary, rather than as a series of shared models. (See the Common Domain Model Antipattern for more detail)

A good sign of a well defined taxonomy is one that can be applied easily by service developers throughout their own domain models.

Types, not models

Avoid types with attributes

Try to keep your central taxonomy populated with terms, are than models. Therefore, be careful as you start to add attributes to items in your central taxonomy, as it starts to become a shared domain model, which has real drawbacks.

Whenever you add an attribute, remember that all consumers and publishers have to be able to satisfy the contract, or they won't be able to use the type. You're often better off defining the attributes independently. This allows consumers of the taxonomy to compose and arrange the attributes in ways that are meaningful to them.

This isn't to say that nested, tree structure models aren't useful - they are. But we think that the developers of services should define the models that are most meaningful to them. This is easier to do when the taxonomy contains simple types.

Use the correct base type

Do: Select the most appropriate type to model the concept. Encourage others to do the same. Avoid: Typing things as 'String', when another type is a better fit.

Inheritance & Aliases

When building a rich semantic model for describing business terms, inheritance is a powerful way to increase the richness of terms.

Use inherits to increase specificity

In Object-oriented software, inheritance is often discouraged.

However, in taxonomy land, when were modelling single-attribute types, inherits is a great way building a hierarchy of specialisation.

type Name inherits String
type FirstName inherits Name
type LastName inherits Name

Inheritance works in a single direction. ie., using the above example, we can say:

All FirstNames are also Names, but not all Names are FirstNames

Use type aliases when things are synonymous

Type aliases are useful for indicating two ideas (generally from different taxonomies or schemas) mean exactly the same thing.

type FirstName inherits Name
type LastName inherits Name

type alias GivenName as FirstName // GivenNames and FirstNames are interchangeable
type alias Surname as LastName

Avoid system-specific and publisher-specific variations in the base taxonomy

Use inheritance to refine the "what", not the "who", "when" or "where"

Use inheritance when you want to capture that something is a specialisation of a concept, rather than for modelling the context surrounding a concept.

ie., avoid specialising types to cater for concepts such as:

• Who created it
• When it was created
• Where it was published

For example, avoid things like:

// Don't do this
type AmazonPrice inherits Price