Re: How to link to Companies House (UK) data?

Hi Phil,
Thank you very much for your reply.
Your suggestion is very interesting, and it points to a common issue I 
have in data modelling in the LOD world: I come from a programming 
background, and it is very easy for me unhelpfully to fall back on my 
experience of strictly typed languages (like C++), in which classes are 
user-defined data types, and in which each object is 'typed' by being an 
instance of exactly one Class. But I'm now finding it more helpful to 
see classes in RDF as mathematical sets - an object can belong to more 
than one set.

My programming background also leads me to ponder the efficiency of 
queries made on my dataset. For example, with your suggestion, by declaring

    <http://business.data.gov.uk/id/company/08209948> a
    org:FormalOrganization .

it means that one needs to look inside 
<http://business.data.gov.uk/id/company/08209948> to find out if it has 
the properties of a rov:RegisteredOrganization. But then I guess that is 
always the case - even if I had declared

    <http://business.data.gov.uk/id/company/08209948> a
    rov:RegisteredOrganization

there is still no guarantee that the properties that I'm interested in 
will have been defined for that particular rov:RegisteredOrganization 
instance. Again, I am getting my head around the difference between LOD 
data models and user-defined types in programming languages.

I may well ask another question on this list about how best to organize 
a triple store to provide efficient queries: in particular, how much 
data from other datasets would one replicate in one's own triple store, 
and are there standard best practices for cacheing that avoid explicit 
replication.

Best regards
Matt

On 13/01/2017 10:48, Phil Archer wrote:
> Hi Matt,
>
> Welcome along. I think in the case you give, the predicate you're 
> looking for is 'a', i.e. your object is both a my:Thing and a 
> rov:RegisteredOrganization (or org:FormalOrganization as you wish).
>
> The latter is a reference to the ORG Ontology, 
> https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/ which is what you probably want. So 
> I'd do this:
>
> <http://business.data.gov.uk/id/company/08209948> a 
> org:FormalOrganization, my:Thing .
>
> Make sense?
>
> Phil
>
>
> On 12/01/2017 13:28, Matt Wallis wrote:
>> As a relative newcomer to LOD (first post here), I have a very basic
>> question: How to link from an object specified in RDF to a Companies
>> House URI for data about a particular registered company?
>>
>> Suppose, for example that I have a class, my:Thing, and that some of
>> these Things are also registered companies. I want to provide a link
>> from an instance of my:Thing to the data held by Companies House.
>> Let's suppose that the Companies House URI is
>> http://business.data.gov.uk/id/company/08209948.
>>
>> Is there an existing predicate that I can simply add to my resource
>> description? Like this:
>>
>>    my:object a my:Thing .
>>    my:object predicate 
>> <http://business.data.gov.uk/id/company/08209948> .
>>
>> Or do I need to modify the definition of the my:Thing class in order to
>> provide this link? If so how?
>>
>> An extra requirement is that I don't want the mechanism to be
>> UK-specific. I see from the Companies House data model
>> (http://business.data.gov.uk/companies/docs/data-model-reference.html)
>> that it uses the Registered Organization Vocabulary
>> (https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-regorg/) which is not UK-specific. In
>> particular:
>>
>> http://business.data.gov.uk/companies/def/terms/RegisteredCompany
>>    rdfs:subClassOf http://www.w3.org/ns/regorg#RegisteredOrganization
>>
>> So I'm hoping that there's a straightforward way for the linkage
>> mechanism to work without it being UK-specific.
>>
>> In case it is relevant, my:Thing is actually
>> http://purl.org/solidarityeconomics/experimental/essglobal/vocab/SSEInitiative 
>>
>> ..
>>
>


-- 
Matt Wallis
Institute for Solidarity Economics
http://www.solidarityeconomics.org