As I have said before, it’s not so much a matter of what can be done, it’s much more about being able to edit keywords in one piece of software and have another piece of software understand them and use them.
Before DxO starting doing anything about a DAM, I started writing my own app (macOS) to fill in the gap.
It has been a nightmare! Trying to read and write metadata that works for every other piece of software is meant to be based on standards and the best source of the most universal standard is the MWG (Metadata Working Group) guidelines. The problem is, Adobe, who participated in their drawing up, have decided to diverge from them - to the extent of having two apps, Lr and Bridge, which default to different rules and, what’s more, offer not very easily findable ways of changing how they write stuff!
Then you have all the other software which sort of, possibly, maybe, adhere to the guidelines - at least according to how they have managed to interpret them. And, I must add, that includes my app which, I hope, does its best to bridge those gaps.
To start with, my app has a dedicated Keyword Manager, where keywords can be: added, removed, renamed, arranged in hierarchies, etc. This is key to ease of use, allowing searching for keywords, in their hierarchies, and directly adding them to the keywords box in the main window for one or more images simply by double-clicking on a word in the manager popup window.
Of course, now, @platypus pointed out that a user would have had to enter all their keywords, one at a time, into my app - which, when you see the size of some of the ready-made lists that are available, could take quite some time and effort. So, I am now in the middle of adding in being able to import ready-made lists and, so far, what I have done is working quite well but your post has caused me to think seriously about adding in non-exporting and synonym functionality.
Questions
For synonyms, how do you determine which word “takes the lead”?
Take this example from the Foundation List:
[~Characteristic]
beautiful
cute
{adorable}
{lovable}
{sweet}
short
tall
ugly
… where there are three synonyms for cute and, presumably, are, sort of, “children” and not “siblings”
In your example of airports, which is a domain I have worked in, ICAO, IATA and names could all qualify for being the “master”. Or do we have to have a mutual lookup from each one to the other?
Do you always write the name, or could there be a requirement to write IATA or ICAO? And who decides?
Or would you have simply have two synonyms (for IATA and ICAO) linked to that airport name?