Why and when to use specialization?

You use specialization to define new structural types or new information domains. Specialization provides a way to adapt your design for increased consistency or descriptiveness. You can also use specialization for specific output demands that the current data model does not meet.

All specializations can be processed by existing transforms and can also be transformed back to more general equivalents.

Benefits of specialization include the following:

• You can reuse the base vocabulary to define specializations and save the time it takes to create them.

• Changes to base elements automatically percolate to the specializations.

• You can easily plug in modules depending on requirements.

• You can revert specializations to their base types easily.

• Interoperability or mapping from specialized type documents to base type documents is guaranteed.