Ly2defined

Ly2defined is a metadata framework and specification designed to help organizations formalize natural-language terms into machine-interpretable definitions. It provides a lightweight approach to link labels in glossaries, catalogs, and ontologies to explicit definitions, relationships, and provenance, enabling more consistent interpretation across systems.

The concept emerged from collaborations among data-governance and semantic-web communities in the late 2010s. The aim was to bridge plain glossaries with ontology-friendly representations, improving interoperability and search. The current stable release, Ly2defined 1.2, was published in the early 2020s, with ongoing work to expand mappings to established standards such as SKOS and JSON-LD.

Structure and content of a Ly2defined entry include fields such as id, label, definition, synonyms, scope notes, provenance, related terms, and cross-references to external ontologies. Entries can be stored in JSON-LD or YAML and validated against a core schema. The framework prioritizes provenance and versioning to track changes over time and to support auditability.

Implementation and tooling include a validator, a converter to JSON-LD, and a sample generator for glossaries. Libraries and plugins exist for common development environments, with adapters for data catalogs and knowledge graphs to ingest Ly2defined entries.

Applications and reception: Ly2defined is used in university projects, corporate data catalogs, and knowledge-graph initiatives to improve searchability and interoperability. Adoption varies by organization, with praise for clarity and governance benefits and critiques centered on the learning curve and documentation effort.

See also: SKOS, RDF, JSON-LD, OWL, terminology management. Official documentation is maintained by the Ly2defined Consortium.