It documents the standardization and registration of metadata to make data understandable and shareable.
An example of a value domain for "sex of person" is "M = Male, F = Female, U = Unknown".
The data element concept "monthly net income of person" may thus have one data element called "monthly net income of individual by 100 dollar groupings" and one called "monthly net income of person range 0-1000 dollars", etc., depending on the heterogeneity of representation that exists within the data holdings covered by one ISO/IEC 11179 registry.
The purpose of the registry is to maintain a semantically precise structure of data elements.
Software AG's COTS Metadata Registry (MDR) product supports the ISO 11179 standard and continues to be sold and used for this purpose in both commercial and government applications (see Vendor Tools section below).
[2] and is promoted by The Open Group as a foundation of the Universal Data Element Framework.
Although the ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry is 6-part standard comprising several hundreds of pages, the primary model is presented in Part-3 and depicted in UML diagrams to facilitate understanding, supported by normative text.
The eXtended Metadata Registry initiative, XMDR led by the US, explored the use of ontologies as the basis for MDR content in order to provide richer semantic framework than could be achieved by lexical and syntax naming conventions alone.
The XMDR experimented with a prototype using OWL, RDF and SPARQL to prove the concept.
To some extent, certain existing software implementations suffer from poor design and potential security vulnerabilities, which hinder the adoption of ISO/IEC 11179.