Re: Fwd: [Moderator Action] Re: reportsTo in the Org Ontology

Hi Joćo Paulo,

> Will you please point us to examples of usage of the org ontology that we
> can use to justify arguments of backward compatibility?

It has been in use for UK organogram publication for at least 18 months:
http://data.gov.uk/organogram/cabinet-office

I believe it has been used by groups in France (who provided the French 
translation), Spain, and the US (including Health Department information 
that George mentioned). I don't have public links to any of those 
examples but Phil was asking for them a few weeks back so may have more.

The org:Post extension, while based on the UK organogram extensions [1], 
was also motivated by requirements identified by Bart van Leeuwen (as 
part of some EU projects). Bart reported that the extension met those needs.

> I am still puzzled with "reportsTo", Š I've had the chance to look into
> this in more detail:
>
> org:Post is a subclass of org:Organization
>
> org:Organization is a subclass of foaf:Person
>
> Thus, org:Post is a subclass of foaf:Agent.

Correct.

> This means that the union in the domain and range would be unnecessary (as
> foaf:Agent would cover all the possibilities).

Yes but foaf:Agent is a more general statement than the current union. 
That generalization wouldn't do any harm but the current approach makes 
the fact that an organization can hold a post more explicit, which is 
desirable.

> Further, it would mean that org:Organization is within also the domain and
> range of reportsTo. In fact, "reportsTo" can be applied to any combination
> of foaf:Agent, org:Organization, org:Post, foaf:GroupŠ all with different
> semantics.

No, they are not different semantics. Certainly in normal life people 
are happy saying they report to a specific person, to a committee or to 
the holder(s) of post (e.g. "I report to the head of R&D"). I don't 
think those are fundamentally different semantics of reporting.

As we have already agreed, it is certainly possible to have much more 
fine grained and nuanced representation of reporting but that is out of 
scope for ORG and should be addressed through extensions (ORG profiles).

> I think that saying that org:Post is a subclass of org:Organization could
> be part of the problem here.

I think we've been round this loop before :)

It is the case that in the UK government some posts be held by multiple 
people at the same time. That does seem to make such Posts a kind of 
organization (an organized group of people cooperating for a common 
purpose). That was the view taken in the original UK modelling [1] and I 
was keen to make the org:Post extension compatible with that since that 
usage has been reasonably successful.

> It leads to other questions such as: what is
> the semantics of "subOrganizationOf" when used between posts?

Exactly what it would normally mean. If PostA is a subOrganization of 
PostB then that would imply all the holders of PostA necessarily hold 
PostB. I wouldn't expect anyone to use such constructs but it does no 
harm that they are possible.

> And
> what about foaf:birthday (a property of foaf:Agent)Š This would also be an
> unusual
> property of an org:Post.

True but just because a property exists doesn't mean it can be applied 
blindly to any particular instance. There is no cardinality constraint 
that makes foaf:birthday a required property. Equally I wouldn't use 
foaf:birthday on an org:Organization even though that is not explicitly 
banned.

> By the way, there are several problems with the non-normative picture in
> the working draft.

Please be more explicit. If there are specific problems then describe 
them precisely so they can be fixed. Especially at this very late stage 
in the process such general statements are not helpful.

> Including the omission of "specialization" between
> foaf:Agent, org:Organization and org:Post.

The diagram is not complete, and not intended to be, some links have 
been omitted for clarity. That's one of the reasons the diagram is not 
normative.

>>> The semantics of "reportTo" between foaf:Agents
>>> is that the agents have some kind of reporting relationship in the
>>> scope of some (undetermined) organization. In this case, it would be
>>> unreasonable to expect that "reportsTo" is acyclic between
>>> foaf:Agents...
>>> In contrast, the semantics of "reportsTo" between foaf:Posts is that
>>> there exists some kind of reporting relation in the scope of a
>>> specific organization. In this case, "reportsTo" may as well be
>>> acyclic, as suggested (?) in the current document in a usage note for
>>> "headOf".
>>
>>That's a different issue. It is possible that the comment on acyclic
>>relationships is too strong.
>
> Ok, so how should this be processed into the current draft? (Sorry for the
> question, I am new to this!) do we track these issues somehow?

If the working group agrees that that is an issue that should be 
addressed then it gets logged on the issue tracker [2].

That would be a small editorial change and would not affect Last Call so 
I'd be happy to see that logged as an issue.

>>The harm in removing it is lack of backward compatibility and the fact
>>that people sometimes just want to say something simple like "fred
>>reports to jim".
>>
>>I've some sympathy with what you are saying here, but am not yet
>>convinced the change is justified. Maybe we should see what feedback we
>>get from Last Call?
>>
>>Dave
>
> I still need to understand the implications of the "Last Call" status...

It means the working group thinks the work has been finished and has put 
it out for final community review.

If a problem is identified by that community review then the group has 
to decide whether it needs to be addressed. If so the spec needs to be 
revised which may or may not mean a further "Last Call" period.

The group can decide that some issues should not be addressed or should 
be postponed to a future working group and can try to proceed to 
Candidate Recommendation (CR) phase anyway.  The key is that in going to 
CR the working group has to explain what it has done about all of the 
issues raised by the Last Call review, one way or another.

It is also possible that the work needed to address Last Call comments 
is more than the time available from the editors or the working group 
charter in which case the spec is abandoned.

Dave

[1] http://reference.data.gov.uk/def/central-government

[2] http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/track/products/5

Received on Thursday, 8 November 2012 21:47:58 UTC