Re: Organization ontology

On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 22:27 +0100, William Waites 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?

Indeed, as it says in the documentation, almost all Organization
categorization is left to extension vocabularies and we deliberately
avoided including distinctions such as partnerships, corporations etc
since they are so jurisdiction-specific.

The only categorization we included is this separation between
externally recognized entities and internal units - extensions and
applications are free to by-pass that and directly exploit
org:Organization. 

> I don't think the distinction is useless as such, perhaps that it is
> underspecified and "Formal" is ambiguous.

I agree there's an element of underspecification in there. However,
sufficiently many of the existing vocabularies that we surveyed have a
similar separation that it seemed valuable to include it, if only to
help with mapping.

Over time, if people apply org but find this distinction unhelpful or
confusing we could deprecate it. The aim here was to get something
workable (not necessarily perfect) done quickly and make it available.
If org proves useful then it can improved in response to application
experience.

Cheers,
Dave

Received on Tuesday, 8 June 2010 08:15:10 UTC