A canon for interiors and architecture
352 terms across 11 authored axes, each with a stable identifier, a one-sentence boundary, and a record of where it came from and when. It exists because seven independent style vocabularies had already been built across five repositories, carrying 150 terms between them, answering five different questions while all being called style.
Identifiers here do not move. A term that turns out to be on the wrong axis is deprecated and given a pointer to its replacement; it is never deleted and never re-used, because a published identifier that vanishes is worse than one that was wrong.
Three ways in
Read it
Start at the axes, where each one carries the question it answers and the boundary that decides where it ends. The boundary is the useful part: it settles the arguments that produced seven vocabularies in the first place.
Import it
@instruments/taxonomy ships the dictionaries as typed constants, with the consumer crosswalks alongside them. Everything on this site is generated from that package, so the page and the import cannot disagree.
Link to it
Every term has a URI, and every URI serves SKOS as JSON-LD and Turtle. Cite https://taxonomy.materialinstruments.com/style/minimalism and it will still mean that in five years.
Coverage
Including the gaps, because a vocabulary that only publishes what it has covered cannot be used to decide whether to depend on it.
| Axis | Question | Terms | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Material family | What is it made of? | 17 | Published 0.1.0 |
| Sector | What market does the project serve? | 10 | Published 0.1.0 |
| Application | What is this product used for? | 88 | Published 0.1.0 |
| Space | What room is this? | 48 | Authored |
| Element | What part of the building fabric is this? | 49 | Authored |
| Typology | What kind of building is this? | 39 | Authored |
| Style | What named idiom does it follow? | 25 | Authored |
| Period | When was it made, or when does it evoke? | 11 | Authored |
| Mood | What does it feel like to be in? | 17 | Authored |
| Palette | What colour is it? | 27 | Authored |
| Place | Where is it, or where does it evoke? | 21 | Authored |
| Strategy | What was the design trying to achieve? | 0 | Declared, no terms |
| Density | How much is going on? | 0 | Declared, no terms |
| Form | What geometric move does it make? | 0 | Declared, no terms |
How the vocabulary is governed, what it may be used for, and the one claim it refuses to make: governance. Why a canon was needed at all: the disagreement view.