Organization Ontology: Shouldn't org:Post be an Agent?

Hi all,

I have a question relating to the Organization Ontology. I am mailing this
list since the public-gld-comments list, which served the Organization
Ontology, is no longer active and suggests to this list instead.

I am working on a modelling exercise for the Flemish Government. One of the
use cases we wish to support is the differentiation between a natural
person and that person when playing his role(s) as government official.
This differentiation is needed to allow the person and each separate role
to have different contact details, among other things.

As an example:
- John Doe can be mailed at john.doe@example.com
- The mayor of the city (currently John Doe, but this might be someone else
next year) can be mailed at mayor@city.be

This concept (which I'll call "Alias" as a working name) is very similar to
the Post concept <https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/#class-post> defined in
Org. The only difference being that Org seems to differentiate between Post
and Agent, while we find that Alias should be a subclass of Agent.

The Organization Ontology does not list Post as a subclass of Agent and
differentiates the two in its specification (eg: org:reportsTo has domain
"owl:unionOf(foaf:Agent org:Post)").
However, looking back at the origin, Post was
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-gld-wg/2012Sep/0031.html>
originally
defined
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-gld-wg/2012Sep/0023.html>as a
subclass of Organisation, at one point in the review there was discussion
whether or not it should really be a subclass and it was dropped altogether
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-gld-wg/2013Feb/0073.html>. I
believe this drop was to strict, and should have been a replacement by "is
a subclass of Agent". A similar argument for having Agent function as an
Agent is made by later comments
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-gld-comments/2014Mar/0011.html>
.

We will solve this issue by creating a new subclass of both org:Post and
Agent, though I feel this is an issue with the original definition of
org:Post itself.

Best regards,
Dieter De Paepe

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