Infrastructure for Multilayer Interoperability
Infrastructure for Multilayer Interoperability (IMI) is a scheme to allow use of data across different fields, or domains, by unifying terminology used in a variety of domains and organizations. In Japan, investigations and development of the IMI scheme have been made since 2013, led primarily by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA).
For unifying terminology, the IMI scheme has prepared "vocabulary data" that provides textual expressions, meaning and relationships of terms, etc. in a structured manner. Depending on the width of domains in which the terms are used, the vocabulary data is classified into the three layers of "core vocabulary," "domain common vocabularies" and "domain-specific vocabularies." Data is accumulated in accordance with these layers and provided as the "vocabulary database." Application of the data in the vocabulary database to the terms in various data including open data will make it easier to realize data sharing among different systems.
