Commitment · Cross-cutting

A term may be known by other names, and they are labels, not terms

adopted a build gate proves it

A row has one preferred label and may carry alternate labels: the abbreviations, trade names and spellings a reader or a machine will actually search by. An alternate label is a lexical fact about the same term, never a second row and never a relationship. It is admitted only where the name is in established use, it never repeats the row's own label or any label or alternate label of another row in the same kind, and it is projected wherever the label is: in the structured data as alternateName, in the search index and the header search, and in llms.txt.

What goes wrong without it

A term searched under the name its readers use and not found is, for them, a term that does not exist. Thesaurus practice has one preferred term per concept and non-preferred terms that lead to it, and SKOS makes the same distinction with one preferred label and any number of alternative labels that never collide within a scheme. This model carried one name per term and none of the names the trade uses for the same thing, so CTR found nothing and Click-through Rate had to be known in advance. The names belong on the term they name, and the same integrity rule that keeps a label unique in its kind keeps the aliases honest.

What proves it — 1

Each is a gate the build runs: a check inside a ring, a whole ring, or an eval beside them. A build stops at the first that refuses.

registry integritylabel integrity
A row has one label and may carry alternate labels; every alternate label is a distinct non-empty name that is not the row's own label and matches no label or alternate label of another row in the same kind, so a name resolves to one term within its kind and a search by any name a term is known under finds it.

Derived from — 3

W3CSKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference
International Organization for StandardizationISO 25964-1:2011 Information and documentation, Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies, Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval
Schema.org Community Groupschema.org alternateName

Where this model stands

Alternate labels sit on measures known by an abbreviation (CTR, ROAS, CLV, CPL, CPA, SOV, VCR, CVR), on trade and spelling variants of channels, surfaces, content types, formats, attribution rules, states, purposes, lawful bases, grains, forms, units, platforms and one vendor, and on the campaign flight. A row with no established second name carries none.

The same name may be an alias in two kinds, as Leads is for a Metric and a KPI, because a name resolves within a kind and the search shows the kind beside every result.

The header search matches an alias a little below the label at each rung, so an abbreviation finds its term and a term named for the abbreviation, were there one, would still come first.

What it does not claim

Alternate labels are English only. A label in another language is a preferred label in that language, which SKOS keeps per language and this model does not yet carry.

RUL-029