IMS VDEX allows the exchange and expression of simple machine-readable lists of human language terms, along with information that may assist a human in understanding the meaning of the various terms. Put more simply, it is a mark-up language – or grammar – for controlled vocabularies, with VDEX allowing the description and creation of controlled vocabularies that could be easily interchanged.

The term ‘vocabulary’ is defined in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) online as ‘a collection or list of words with brief explanations of their meanings’. The vocabulary that VDEX is capable of encoding can be of a number of types: a simple flat list of terms; a glossary or dictionary; a thesaurus; or a hierarchy of terms. The VDEX specification does not attempt to accommodate all possible vocabularies and cannot support vocabularies of arbitrary complexity; however, there is limited allowance for complex vocabularies, such as faceted schemes, multi-language thesauri and polyhierarchical taxonomies.

VDEX was developed as an open specification by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, with the Final Specification being approved in February 2004. The specification includes an extensive Best Practice and Implementation Guide, an Information Model and an XML Binding Guide that defines how to represent a vocabulary in XML.

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