Re: Requirement for 3W interop standard (new proposed schema attached)

Below:

Mandana Sotoodeh wrote:
> 1- Organization like Red Cross may set up local offices depending on 
> the type of activities or given emergency. However could we have 
> independent local offices which participate in an activity,  for 
> example, by providing fund or resources such as people? Could we have 
> one entity to represent both kinds? If yes, then we may need the 
> schema to allow to have offices independent of organizations (Office 
> may not be a good name for it). If they can't be the same entity, 
> please share some use cases of how it works in reality.
I'm not sure how you would have an office without an organisation? A 
local office would just be a branch of the main organisation 
(sub-office, field office, regional office, the terminology will differ 
depending on organisation. I'm not sure what sort of situation you're 
thinking of here, can you clarify?

> 2- Can OrgPerson represent the volunteers that join an activity on 
> fly? There might be some volunteers that are available but not 
> particularly assigned to any activity. Do we need different entities 
> to represent them? If not, then the model should allow a contact 
> person to be part of the staff or on its own. (OrgPerson is not a good 
> name either since in that case it doesn’t have to be attached to an 
> organization but potentially the model should allow it).
I am not sure that the extant W3 model addresses the question of 
staffing. OrgPerson is usually the contact person for the organisation 
(or more accurately office), which is useful for the purposes of 
co-ordination. It is not so useful to have complete staffing profiles of 
the entire range of organisations in the domain covered by the W3 - it's 
not manageable, nobody has the authority to direct them, and it could 
also create additional security risks, particularly for national staff. 
Most NGOs would be unwilling to share their staff details outside the 
organisation, I think.

> 3- The office, Contact and Activity have their own assigned locations. 
> This allows to model activities that occur in a different location 
> than the office executing it.  At the same time the model captures 
> location information about the office as well. It also allows to have 
> information about the location of contact people when they are not 
> assigned to any activity.
I assume that a Contact will normally be located against an office location.

The weakness of the W3 is the level of granularity. Let's say you have 
an organisation doing WASH, Health, Education and Shelter activities. 
Each of those is likely to have a project manager, but the organisation 
may only give the contact details for its overall programme director. 
Because it's a voluntary submission, any data structures we develop will 
have to be maximally flexible to accomodate the different levels of 
detail that different organisations might give.

cheers
Paul C

Received on Friday, 8 August 2008 13:35:25 UTC