Scope

Summary

A scope is the extent of the terms, definitions and other documentation that a community (or party, which we call the owner of the scope) needs to express, communicate and validate its knowledge as relevant to achieving a specific subset of its objectives.

Other documentation includes curated texts, and artifacts that are generated from that, such as glossaries, dictionaries and the like. It also includes tags that can be used e.g. to refer to other scopes (scopetags), identify different versions for artifacts (versiontags), or create particular groups of terms (grouptags).

Scopes, that is: their contents, must be curated. Since this requires particular capabilities that the owning community may lack, we say that this curation is done by a so-called terms community, whose members are individuals that do have such capabilities; they serve the owning community as the curators of the scope.

A scope can contain multiple terminologies; it is expected that at least one such terminology is committed to by the owning community.

Scopes may overlap, or be nested, in a similar way as [namespaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namespace).

The terminology pattern provides an overview of how this concept fits in with related concepts.

Purpose

The purpose of having scopes is that it enables communities (and other parties) to come to develop and maintain terminologies that are not only relevant for realizing specific objectives, but also are fit for expressing and communicating the knowledge that is used for doing so. This is known as curation of a scope. Specifically, scopes provide the members of the owning community (but also non-members) to establish a provable similar understanding of the concepts and other semantic units, which is prerequisite for fruitful cooperation, and realizing objectives.