Re: Organization ontology

Hi all,

Organizations can be formal, semi-formal, informal, etc. It can be
constituted by a person or a group of persons (collection / association of
people) for some purpose / objectives. I am not sure if there can be an
association of people, without a purpose!

Instead of members - stakeholders, contacts, associates, interested parties,
etc. may be relevant.

Best,

Kris Dev

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 2:57 AM, William Waites <william.waites@okfn.org>wrote:

> On 10-06-03 16:04, Dave Reynolds wrote:
> > It would be great if you could suggest a better phrasing of the
> > description of a FormalOrganization that would better encompass the
> > range of entities you think should go there? Or are you advocating that
> > the distinction between a generic organization and a externally
> > recognized semi-autonomous organization is not a useful one?
> >
>
> Reading the rest of your mail, I think the latter. Do we really need
> FormalOrganisation at all? Can we not just have Organisation and
> then some extension vocabulary could have subclasses for different
> flavours of partnerships, corporations, unincorporated associations
> etc. as needed?
>
> I don't think the distinction is useless as such, perhaps that it is
> underspecified and "Formal" is ambiguous.
>
> > Again don't over read into the name. All we are doing is providing a
> > trinary relationship between people, organizations and roles. How a
> > particular application of the ontology wants to further model roles is
> > up to it. Given that we had to pick a name for the relationship then
> > "membership" seemed reasonable, any alternative ("affiliate", "belongs
> > to" etc) is likely to suffer from the same problem that there are
> > English language or legal connotations for it that would trip people up.
> > The most neutral alternative I came up with was "RoleInstance" but that
> > is (a) off-puttingly technical and (b) confusing since it's an owl:Class
> > and not the same as an instance of org:Role.
> >
>
> How about simply org:Relationship since it expresses details of the
> relationship of a person to an organisation? Then we could have,
> perhaps again in an extension vocabulary, Membership where that
> makes sense in the common usage, Shareholder, Partner, etc.
>
> >> The
> >> president of ${big_corporation} cannot be said to have any kind
> >> of membership relationship to that corporation, for example.
> >>
> > He plays a role that we might call "president" in that organization and
> > that could very happily be represented by an instance of the
> > org:Membership class.
> >
>
> I don't disagree that you can model it coherently like that, I just find
> the choice of name here jarring.
>
> > If the name of the Class is a barrier then it would be easy for you, in
> > specializing the ontology, to create a new Class for the relationship
> > which better suits the terminology of your application and make that a
> > sub-class or equivalent-class of org:Membership.
> >
>
> ... and an owl reasoner, etc. etc.
>
> I would just like it so that someone (human) reading some data in N3
> without necessarily reading the details of the vocabulary would
> understand the rough meaning. I think Membership is not "membership"
> in the usual sense and is confusing.
>
> Cheers,
> -w
>
> --
> William Waites           <william.waites@okfn.org>
> Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
> Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK
>
>


-- 
Kris Dev,
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