[INFOD-WG] Action item 186: Should there be Vocabulary Association for Consumers?

[Dieter Gawlick]

The INFOD Base Specification support vocabulary association for 
publishers but not for consumers. The question is: should there be 
vocabulary associations for consumers?

It looks like the term *vocabulary association* is somewhat confusing. 
Vocabulary associations represent the specifications of actual data that 
a publisher makes available.

What would be a better term? The simplest term to express the 
functionally of what is currently called vocabulary association is 
*data*. In the current INFOD model a data object is associated to 
exactly one vocabulary and to exactly on publisher. This setup implies 
which publishers provide data structured with a certain vocabulary, one 
of the key elements of INFOD.

Subscribers (and publishers) may also be interested in knowing in what 
vocabularies consumers are able to receive messages. This could 
obviously be done by associating data vocabularies to consumers directly 
– not indirectly using a construct equivalent to data. Doing so, 
consumers could specify which vocabularies must be used to make sure 
that data are understood and can be properly processed. Additionally, 
consumers could specify the reaction to any other data that are not 
structure with any of the associated vocabularies. The obvious choices 
would be either to reject any message not structured in one of the 
associated vocabularies or try to understand the message as best as 
possible

Proposed work:

    * Rename vocabulary association in *data (sources?)*
    * Make data (sources) as part of the items
    * Allow association between consumers and data vocabularies
    * Add defaults on whether sending data not structured in any of the
      vocabularies is permissible
    * Describe to impact on sending/receiving messages
    * Describe to impact on subscriptions

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