Re: Implementation questions about the ORG Ontology

A brief update to the group on this.

Bart and I have met in the sidelines at semtech and discussed a route 
forward. It is relatively straightforward to extend Org with a notion of 
"Post". Jeni Tennison defined a similar extension for the UK government 
work on publishing organograms [1] so this seems to be a common need.

The challenging part is how to handle the overlap with the 
org:Membership n-ary relation. There's a balance between complexity (too 
many ways to do the same thing) and backward compatibility with current 
usage.

Bart and I will iterate a proposal between us and aim to bring something 
back to the group, hopefully over the next few weeks, to get feedback.

Dave

[1] http://data.gov.uk/organogram

On 17/09/12 15:45, Bart van Leeuwen wrote:
> Dave,
>
> Will you be in london semtech ? if so could we schedule half an hour to
> cover this, and give some feedback to the group ?
>
> Met Vriendelijke Groet / With Kind Regards
> Bart van Leeuwen
> @semanticfire
>
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> From: Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com>
> To: Bart van Leeuwen <Bart_van_Leeuwen@netage.nl>,
> Cc: W3C GLD WG WG <public-gld-wg@w3.org>
> Date: 23-05-2012 11:08
> Subject: Re: Implementation questions about the ORG Ontology
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> Hi Bart,
>
> Partial reply for now. When I get some time free to look at it properly
> I'll hope to offer a better response.
>
> The basic use case of describing an organizational structure without
> having to have named individuals is definitely a reasonable one.
>
> I know that the UK use of org for "organograms" did achieve this by
> defining the notion of a "post"[1]. In their case, if I recall
> correctly, a post was in fact treated as an organization because there
> are cases where a post is in fact fulfilled by multiple people or indeed
> a committee. So there when someone takes up a post they have a
> membership relationship with the post as well as to organization
> containing the post.
>
> It might be that some extension like this should be added to org, or at
> least pointed out as a design pattern.
>
> [The alternative of having reporting relations between roles may be
> simpler but has some problems and wouldn't cope with the complexities of
> UK government.]
>
> When I get time I'll dig out the UK extensions and circulate some
> information on them and any further thoughts.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>
> [1] Those extensions were developed by Jeni Tennision.
>
> On 22/05/12 09:33, Bart van Leeuwen wrote:
>  > Hi GLD-WG.
>  >
>  > As indicated in my earlier mail I'm now looking at implementation
>  > scenarios for the various products of our working group.
>  >
>  > One of the things we would like to do is to have a structure to exchange
>  > information about 'Chain of command' situations.
>  > In my work, organizations are not build up around individuals, but
>  > around roles people have. This counts for our own organization, as much
>  > as I love my job I'm not there 24/7, but also for the organizations we
>  > deal with.
>  > We are interested in exchanging details about the structure of a
>  > organization without directly filling out the names.
>  >
>  > To give two small examples.
>  > 1) Hotels
>  > Hotels need to have a evacuation staff, in case of fire alarms they have
>  > several tasks in conjunction with the fire department, the size of this
>  > group might vary over the time of day.
>  > We are not so interested in all the names of people who are "fire
>  > department contacts" in crisis situation, because only one of them will
>  > be on the scene anyway, or will play that role during an incident.
>  > The same applies to the evacuation staff, we are not interested in the
>  > individuals, but more the numbers, if during a night shift only 2 people
>  > with the 'evacuation' role are present we need to scale up on our side.
>  > A schema of which roles are there on specific times of the day and how
>  > their internal reporting structure is organized would be interesting
>  > information.
>  >
>  > 2) Cross border incidents
>  > If a incident happens on the border between two countries the parties on
>  > both sides would like to know what the chain of command is on the other
>  > side, which person has the credentials to make political / public
>  > decisions, who should we talk to, and what is the status of their role
>  > against the roles on this side of the border. Since roles are identified
>  > through SKOS:Concepts its really easy to formalize the comparison of the
>  > roles. A Crisis staff in general is assembled from people who are
>  > available or on duty at that time, the formation of a crisis staff puts
>  > a individual in the position of a decision making role. In practice this
>  > means that on forehand its now known who the exact individual will be
>  > during a time of crisis, we just know this role needs to be fulfilled
>  >
>  >  From what I understand from the ORG ontology documentation is that I
>  > can draw this organizational schema by tracking down people and then
>  > draw the lines from Role to Role.
>  > However there doesn't seem to be a way to draw a organizational
>  > structure without names, but with a command chain. What does sort of
>  > work is to have anonymous foaf:Agents but that doesn't feel right since
>  > a foaf:Agent actually represents a instance which is not there yet. Also
>  > there are situations where the Role is present in the schema, but at the
>  > specific time there is no one fulfilling it.
>  >
>  > Before making comments on changing the ontology itself I wanted to be
>  > sure I didn't miss something in the documentation, completely
>  > misunderstand the point or that this use case is out of scope.
>  >
>  >
>  > Met Vriendelijke Groet / With Kind Regards
>  > Bart van Leeuwen
>  > @semanticfire
>  >
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>  > # netage.nl
>  > # http://netage.nl <http://netage.nl/><http://netage.nl/>
>  > # Enschedepad 76
>  > # 1324 GJ Almere
>  > # The Netherlands
>  > # tel. +31(0)36-5347479
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>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 19 September 2012 15:01:48 UTC