Managing Vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies are reusable term lists referenced by schema fields of type vocab/vocab_free (see Managing Schemas) or, as a special case, that define the allowed relation types between records.

Management happens in the admin UI under Configuration → Vocabularies.

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Creating a vocabulary

1. Click New vocabulary.
2. Assign a name (technical identifier, e.g. materials).
3. Choose the type:
   • Term vocabulary (term) — an ordinary term list, e.g. materials, genres, techniques.
   • Relation-type vocabulary (relation) — defines the named relationship types between records (e.g. “Author of”, “Depicted in”). See below.
4. Enable Hierarchical if terms should have parent/child relationships (broader/narrower, e.g. a material taxonomy). Not available for relation-type vocabularies.
5. Optionally set a canonical URI (base or ConceptScheme URI, e.g. http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/) for the Linked Data connection.

On initial installation, the system creates two fixed system vocabularies: relation_types (relation types) and media_types (media types). They cannot be deleted, but their terms can be edited as usual.

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Maintaining terms

Per term, the following can be captured:

Field	Meaning
Term	Technical value, stored in records.
Label	Language-specific display designation (one per configured language).
Parent term	Only for hierarchical vocabularies — places the term in the tree structure.
URI	Canonical identifier URI of the term (e.g. http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300026816), linked directly when set.
Cross-concordances (exactMatch)	List of external match URIs (e.g. Wikidata and GND URIs for the same term), comma-separated or one per line.
Custom fields	If fields for this vocabulary’s vocabulary_term target type were defined under Configuration → Schemas, they additionally appear in the term form.

Terms can be created individually via New term, or imported in bulk via CSV/TSV/JSON or SKOS (Turtle, RDF/XML, JSON-LD, N-Triples) in the Import tab — see Authority Data & Linked Data for the SKOS import and details on URIs and cross-concordances.

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Relation-type vocabularies

For the relation-type vocabulary (relation_types), each term additionally gets:

• Inverse direction (inverse label) — the designation from the reverse perspective (e.g. “Author of” ↔ “Written by”).
• Target types (applies_from / applies_to) — which primary types are allowed as the source or target of the relationship (e.g. only Entity → Object).

These terms are then available for selection on relation fields (field type relation) in the schema editor — see Relations → link to another record.

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Deleting and integrity protection

A vocabulary can only be deleted once no active schema field references it anymore.

Available from version 1.34.0

When deleting individual terms, Katalon automatically checks whether the term is still used in records (objects, entities, places, procedures, etc.) or as a parent term in the vocabulary hierarchy:

• Unused terms: Can be deleted directly.
• Used terms: Katalon blocks accidental deletion and shows the exact number of affected records. Two options are available:
  1. Reassign (choose a replacement term): All occurrences in existing records are automatically migrated to another term of the same vocabulary, which you select.
  2. Delete anyway (force): The term is removed from the vocabulary. In existing records, the stored value ({id, label}) is kept as a historical entry. In the data-entry form, the value is marked with a “Term deleted” badge. Such records can still be opened and saved without validation errors.