RE: Organization ontology

Hello all,
I have the feeling that we are (at least partly) reinventing the wheel
here. There have been several initiatives drafting generic models and
representations for organizations. Just two examples below [1][2] which
go back to 90ies. 
More generally, an in-depth look at design and data patterns literature
could also help a lot. I have the feeling that others before this group
have defined concepts like "organization", "legal entity" etc... We
could re-use their conceptual (or data or formal) models, instead of
starting the discussion from scratch. 
Best regards,
Vassilios

[1] http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/enterprise/enterprise/ontology.html
[2] http://www.eil.utoronto.ca/enterprise-modelling/tove/



-----Original Message-----
From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dave Reynolds
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2010 11:27 AM
To: Emmanouil Batsis (Manos)
Cc: Linked Data community; public-egov-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Organization ontology

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 01:03 +0300, Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) wrote:

> Sorry for jumping in. I was thinking that
> 
> a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called 
> LegalEntity to be more precise.

Not quite, there are other LegalEntities that are not Organizations.

The LegalEntity notion could be made explicit:

     org:FormalOrganization 
         subClassOf org:Organization AND ns:LegalEntity

This is better modelling because the primitive concepts are now explicit
and the nature of org:FormalOrganization as a derived concept is
clear.  

I nearly did it that way but my concern was that putting LegalEntity
into org: would open up a whole can of worms about needing richer
modelling of the notion of LegalEntity (e.g. Jurisdiction etc). That
would be off topic for the focused goals and requirements for org.

> b) what happens when organizations change legal status?

Pretty much any aspect of organizations change over time :) In the
context of this work there are already separate approaches to handling
versioning and change so org: defers to those. Though, in some
applications you do want to explicitly represent the historical trace of
those changes hence the inclusion of OPMV via org:ChangeEvent to give a
minimal foundation for that.

Cheers,
Dave

Received on Tuesday, 8 June 2010 08:49:55 UTC