The following is a snippet from an IM session with Sylvia today (10/1/2010):

anytime we get a value that is not in our controlled vocabulary (as specified in either the esg_data.owl or metafor.owl), then nothing should be set and some sort of notificaiton should be thrown in a log
we want that to happen b/c in the case of the metafor.owl file, they may need to send us an updated one with full CV
in the case of the esg_data.owl, we may want to add that value to our CV