Organization hierarchy

James,
the Popolo protocol currently allows hierarchical relations between organizations to be mapped through the parent_id attribute.

One possible shortcoming is that this is a permanent relation (it has no start nor end dates), and sometimes, especially in political groups, relations do depend on time.

Another lesser shortcoming is it maps compositions (a group, or a big company and its departments), but leaves out aggregations (members can join more than one group).

In a relational world, I would map it with an external entity:

    ------------
  1|            |N
 -----        -----
| Org |------| Rel |
 ----- 1    N -----

Where Rel is the relation and it would have these fields:
id
from_id
to_id
start_date
end_date

from_id and to_id are references to the Org, organizaiton entities.

Don't know how it would translate into the protocol and if the complexity it introduces are worth the issues it tries to solve. 


Any ideas?

Guglielmo Celata
Developer
Associazione Openpolis