Re: Organization ontology

Weren't these details of the discussion the sort of "Mission Creep" the org vocabulary meant to avoid ?  Certainly NGO's including Commercial Interests would like nothing better than to ride the trustworthiness coattails of a Geo-Political State.  But the State is trustworthy precisely because it does not render services to groups, averages or price points, but rather to individuals.  Current "Industry Standards" simply do not protect personal privacy adequately while "Government Standards" must do so.

The org vocabulary has no provision for redaction of what might be private personal information after the next election. But that is not necessary if one is only making the general distinction between Official Function and Functional Office.  The problem arises with the introduction of "Office Function". Forgive me for arguing semantics :) 

--- On Thu, 6/3/10, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:


> > On 10-06-03 09:01, Dan Brickley wrote:
> >> I don't find anything particularly troublesome
> about the org: vocab on
> >> this front. If you really want to critique
> culturally-loaded
> >> ontologies, I'd go find one that declares class
> hierarchies with terms
> >> like 'Terrorist' without giving any operational
> definitions...
> >>
> >
> > I must admit when I looked at the org vocabulary I had
> a feeling
> > that there were some assumptions buried in it but
> discarded a
> > couple of draft emails trying to articulate it.
> >
> > I think it stems from org:FormalOrganization being a
> thing that is
> > "legally recognized" and org:OrganizationalUnit (btw,
> any
> > particular reason for using the North American
> spelling here?)
> 
> 
> Re spelling - fair question. I think there are good
> reasons. British
> spelling accepts both. FOAF, which was made largely in
> Bristol UK but
> with international participants, has used 'Z' spelling for
> nearly a
> decade, http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Organization ... as
> far as I
> know without any complaints. I'm really happy to see this
> detailed
> work happen and hope to nudge FOAF a little too, perhaps
> finding a
> common form of words to define the shared  general Org
> class.
> 
> It would be pretty unfortunate to have foaf:Organization
> and
> org:Organisation; much worse imho than the camel-case vs
> underscore
> differences that show up within and between vocabularies. Z
> seems the
> pragmatic choice.
> 
> I don't know much about English usage outside the UK and
> the northern
> Americas, but I find 'z' is generally accepted in the UK,
> whereas in
> the US, 's' is seen as a mistake. This seems supported by
> whoever
> wrote this bit of wikipedia,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-ise.2C_-ize_.28-isation.2C_-ization.29
> 
> """American spelling accepts only -ize endings in most
> cases, such as
> organize, realize, and recognize.[53] British usage accepts
> both -ize
> and -ise (organize/organise, realize/realise,
> recognize/recognise).[53] British English using -ize is
> known as
> Oxford spelling, and is used in publications of the Oxford
> University
> Press, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary, as well
> as other
> authoritative British sources. """
> 
> 
> > being an entity that is not recognised outside of the
> FormalOrg
> >
> > Organisations can become recognised in some
> circumstances
> > despite never having solicited outside recognition
> from a state --
> > this might happen in a court proceeding after some
> collective
> > wrongdoing. Conversely you might have something that
> can
> > behave like a kind of organisation, e.g. a "class" in
> a class-action
> > lawsuit without the internal structure present it most
> organisations.
> 
> Yes. In FOAF we have a class foaf:Project but it is not
> quite clear
> how best to characteri[sz]e it. In purely FOAF oriented
> scenarios, I
> believe it is hardly ever used (although humm stats below
> seem to
> contradict that). However, the pretty successful DOAP
> project
> ('description of a project') has made extensive use of a
> subclass,
> doap:Project in describing open source collaborative
> projects. These
> have something of the character of an organization, but are
> usually on
> the bazaar end of the cathedral/bazzar spectrum.
> 
> Are some but not all projects also organizations? etc.
> discuss :)
> 
> See also http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Project
> http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap
> 
> http://sindice.com/search?q=foaf:project+&qt=term
> 
> Search results for terms “foaf:project ”, found about
> 13.0 thousand
> (sindice seems to require downcasing for some reason)
> 
> http://sindice.com/search?q=doap:project+&qt=term
> Search results for terms “doap:project ”, found about
> 8.41 thousand
> 
> (I haven't time to dig into those results, probably the
> queries could
> be tuned better to filter out some misleading matches)
> 
> > Is a state an Organisation?
> 
> It would be great to link if possible to FAO's Geopolitical
> ontology
> here, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitical_ontology ...
> this
> for example has a model for groupings that geo-political
> entities
> belong to (I'm handwaving a bit here on the detail). It
> also has a
> class Organization btw, as well as extensive mappings to
> different
> coding systems.
> 
> > Organisational units can often be semi-autonomous
> (e.g. legally
> > recognised) subsidiaries of a parent or holding
> company. What
> > about quangos or crown-corporations (e.g. corporations
> owned
> > by the state). They have legal recognition but are
> really like
> > subsidiaries or units.
> 
> As an aside, I would like to have a way of representing
> boards of
> directors, to update the old (theyrule-derrived) FOAFCorp
> data and
> schema. Ancient page here: http://rdfweb.org/foafcorp/intro.html
> schema http://xmlns.com/foaf/corp/
> 
> > Some types of legally recognised organisations don't
> have a
> > distinct legal personality, e.g. a partnership or
> unincorporated
> > association so they cannot be said to have rights and
> responsibilities,
> > rather the members have joint (or joint and several)
> rights and
> > responsibilities. This may seem like splitting hairs
> but from a
> > legal perspective its an important distinction at
> least in some
> > legal environments. The description provided in the
> vocabulary
> > is really only true for corporations or limited
> companies.
> 
> Am happy to leave Dave and co to fix all that, but welcome
> any advise
> on how http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Organization can
> remain a
> useful high-level class, eg. wording fixes.
> 
> > I think the example, eg:contract1 is misleading since
> this is
> > an inappropriate way to model a contract. A contract
> has two
> > or more parties. A contract might include a duty to
> fill a role
> > on the part of one party but it is not normally
> something that
> > has to do with "membership"
> >
> > Membership usually has a particular meaning as applied
> to
> > cooperatives and not-for-profits. They usually wring
> their hands
> > extensively about what exactly membership means. This
> concept
> > normally doesn't apply to other types of organisations
> and does
> > not normally have much to do with the concept of a
> role. The
> > president of ${big_corporation} cannot be said to have
> any kind
> > of membership relationship to that corporation, for
> example.
> >
> > I think there might be more, but I don't think its a
> problem of
> > "embedding westminister assumptions" because I don't
> think
> > the vocabulary fits very well even in the UK and
> commonwealth
> > countries when you start looking at it closely.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> 
> Some problems are just hard?
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Dan
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 3 June 2010 15:22:35 UTC