Skip to content

Persona Taxonomy

A structured collection of Personas organized as a SKOS Concept Scheme within a Use Case

What is a Persona Taxonomy?

A Persona Taxonomy is an organized collection of all the Personas relevant to a specific Use Case.

Think of it as the "cast of characters" for a use case—everyone and everything that interacts with the system or business capability.

Why it Matters

  • Completeness: Ensures you don't miss important actors or roles.
  • Organization: Groups related personas together (e.g., all customer types, all regulatory entities).
  • Reusability: Once defined, the taxonomy can be inherited by child use cases.

Persona Taxonomy as SKOS Scheme

From a technical perspective, a Persona Taxonomy is a skos:ConceptScheme that groups Personas (which are skos:Concept instances).

Each Persona is a member of exactly one PersonaTaxonomy via the skos:inScheme relationship.

Ownership

  • Owned by Use Case: A PersonaTaxonomy is owned by a specific Use Case (zero or one cardinality).
  • Personas belong to Taxonomy: All Personas in the Use Case are members of the taxonomy.

Inheritance

Lower-level use cases can inherit personas from parent use cases, enabling reuse and consistency.

Ontology (minimal facts we can state today)

Required facts about a Persona Taxonomy

  • Opaque universally unique identifier: A UUID representing this taxonomy.
  • SKOS Concept Scheme: Modeled as skos:ConceptScheme.
  • Owned by Use Case: A reference to the Use Case that owns it (zero or one cardinality).

Relationship to Personas

  • Contains Personas: Personas reference the taxonomy via skos:inScheme.