Re: An organization ontology

Hi Renato,

On 05/10/12 00:07, Renato Iannella wrote:
> Did you consider using/reusing the vCard RDF ontology more extensively
> than just the siteAddress?
> After all, it does provide for more complete People and Org descriptions.

As original author I did consider it. It was a good match for describing 
the address of sites and I was pleased to be able to use it there. 
However, it wasn't such a clear fit for People and Organizations given 
the goals of Org.

For people then vCard does not list[1] a class to represent People (or 
more generally Agents). This is required in Org in order to describe 
things like membership. The vocabulary that provides a concept of 
Person/Agent with the broadest adoption among the early users of Org was 
foaf so that was a natural choice.

I do think it would be useful to have a clear guideline for how to link 
a foaf:Person to their business card represented in vCard. That was a 
separate work item within GLD and is out of scope for Org.

For Organization then there is a vCard:Organization class but it wasn't 
clear whether that is intended to represent the organization itself or 
the organization element on a business card. Given that vCard is 
explicitly about describing electronic business cards then I assumed the 
latter.

If vCard:Organization actually represents the organization itself, then 
there is the question of whether org:Organization could subclass it. 
However, there is a difficulty with that. The vCard ontology contains 
the following restrictions:

:Organization a owl:Class ;
      rdfs:label "vCard Organization Class" ;
      rdfs:comment "Resources that are vCard organizations" ;
      rdfs:subClassOf
          [ a owl:Restriction ;
              owl:onProperty :organization-unit ;
              owl:someValuesFrom rdfs:Literal
          ],
          [ a owl:Restriction ;
              owl:onProperty :organization-name ;
              owl:someValuesFrom rdfs:Literal
          ] .

That means that all vCard:Organizations are expected to have at least 
one vCard:organization-unit label (alongside the organization-name 
label). Yet in Org not all Organizations are OrganizationalUnits so that 
restriction wouldn't be appropriate to "inherit" onto org:Organization.

Hope that all makes sense.

Best wishes,
Dave

[Apologies to chairs for possibly breaking protocol, again.]

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf/#Class

Received on Friday, 5 October 2012 08:22:14 UTC