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
Re: Organization ontology
On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 01:03 +0300, Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) wrote: Sorry for jumping in. I was thinking that a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to be more precise. Not quite, there are other LegalEntities that are not Organizations. The LegalEntity notion could be made explicit: org:FormalOrganization subClassOf org:Organization AND ns:LegalEntity This is better modelling because the primitive concepts are now explicit and the nature of org:FormalOrganization as a derived concept is clear. I nearly did it that way but my concern was that putting LegalEntity into org: would open up a whole can of worms about needing richer modelling of the notion of LegalEntity (e.g. Jurisdiction etc). That would be off topic for the focused goals and requirements for org. b) what happens when organizations change legal status? Pretty much any aspect of organizations change over time :) In the context of this work there are already separate approaches to handling versioning and change so org: defers to those. Though, in some applications you do want to explicitly represent the historical trace of those changes hence the inclusion of OPMV via org:ChangeEvent to give a minimal foundation for that. Cheers, Dave
Re: Organization ontology
Greetings! On 6/7/2010 11:27 PM, Todd Vincent wrote: In the law, there are two concepts (a) Person and (b) Entity. In simple terms: A person is a human. An entity is a non-human. Well, yes, in simple terms but the law isn't always simple. ;-) How would you handle municipalities that are considered to be persons for purposes of Title 42 Section 1983 actions? (civil rights) It remains a municipality for any number of legal purposes but is also a person in other contexts. I am sure a scan of the Federal Code (to say nothing of the case law) would turn up any number of nuances to the concept person. Perhaps not as complex as the attribution of ownership rules in the IRC but enough to be interesting. The law in logic folks did a lot of work on legal concepts. One of the journals was Modern Uses of Logic in Law, later became Jurimetrics. Hope you are having a great day! Patrick Generally, these terms are used to distinguish who has the capacity to sue, be sued, or who lacks the capacity to sue or be sued. A *person* (human) can sue or be sued in an individual capacity, with certain exceptions for juveniles, those who are legally insane, or who otherwise are deemed or adjudicated under the law to lack legal capacity. An *entity* must exist as a legal person under the laws of a state. An entity's existence under the laws of a state occurs either through registration (usually with the secretary of state) or by operation of law (can happen with a partnership). Generally, anything else is not a entity. For example, you cannot sue a group of people on a beach as a entity -- you would have to name each person individually. This is true, because the group of people on a beach typically have done nothing to form a legally recognized entity. From a legal perspective, calling something a Legal Entity is redundant; although from a non-legal perspective, it may provide clarity. In contrast a legal person is not redundant because most legal minds would understand this to mean an entity (i.e., a person with the capacity to sue and be sued that is not a human person). From a data modeling perspective, I find it straightforward to use the terms Person and Organization because (a) typically only lawyers understand Entity and (b) the data model for an organization tends to work for both (legal) entities and for organizations that might not fully meet the legal requirements for an entity. Taking the example below, a large corporation or government agency (both of which are [legal] entities) might be organized into non-legal divisions, subdivisions, departments, groups, etc, that are not (legal) entities but still might operate like, and need to be named as, an organization. Some companies have subsidiaries that are legal (entities). By adding OrganizationType to the Organization data model, you provide the ability to modify the type of organization and can then represent both (legal) entities and (legally unrecognized) organizations. Taxing authorities (e.g., the IRS) have different classifications for entities. An S Corporation, C Corporation, and a Non-Profit Corporation are all (legal) entities, even though their tax status differs. Hope this is helpful for what it is worth. Todd See also U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 17. *From:* public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org] *On Behalf Of *Patrick Logan *Sent:* Monday, June 07, 2010 7:50 PM *To:* Mike Norton *Cc:* public-egov...@w3.org; Dave Reynolds; William Waites; Linked Data community; William Waites; Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) *Subject:* Re: Organization ontology Large corporations often have multiple legal entities and many informal, somewhat overlapping business organizations. Just saying. I wrangled with that. There're several different use cases for these for internal vs external, customer/vendor, financial vs operations, etc. On Jun 7, 2010 3:19 PM, Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.com mailto:xsideofparad...@yahoo.com wrote: I can see Manos' point. It seems that LegalEntity rather the Organization would work well under a sub-domain such as .LAW or .DOJ or .SEC, but under other sub-domains such as .NASA, the Organization element might be better served as ProjectName. All instances would help specify the Organization type, while keeping Organization as the general unstylized element is probably ideal, as inferred by William Waites. Michael A. Norton *From:* Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) ma...@abiss.gr mailto:ma...@abiss.gr a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to be more precise -- Patrick Durusau patr...@durusau.net Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34 Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps) Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300 Co
Re: Organization ontology
Peristeras, Vassilios wrote: Hello all, I have the feeling that we are (at least partly) reinventing the wheel here. There have been several initiatives drafting generic models and representations for organizations. Just two examples below [1][2] which go back to 90ies. More generally, an in-depth look at design and data patterns literature could also help a lot. I have the feeling that others before this group have defined concepts like organization, legal entity etc... We could re-use their conceptual (or data or formal) models, instead of starting the discussion from scratch. Best regards, Vassilios [1] http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/enterprise/enterprise/ontology.html [2] http://www.eil.utoronto.ca/enterprise-modelling/tove/ Both of your links point to PDFs or Postscript docs. Are there any actual ontology doc URLs? Kingsley -Original Message- From: public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dave Reynolds Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2010 11:27 AM To: Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) Cc: Linked Data community; public-egov...@w3.org Subject: Re: Organization ontology On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 01:03 +0300, Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) wrote: Sorry for jumping in. I was thinking that a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to be more precise. Not quite, there are other LegalEntities that are not Organizations. The LegalEntity notion could be made explicit: org:FormalOrganization subClassOf org:Organization AND ns:LegalEntity This is better modelling because the primitive concepts are now explicit and the nature of org:FormalOrganization as a derived concept is clear. I nearly did it that way but my concern was that putting LegalEntity into org: would open up a whole can of worms about needing richer modelling of the notion of LegalEntity (e.g. Jurisdiction etc). That would be off topic for the focused goals and requirements for org. b) what happens when organizations change legal status? Pretty much any aspect of organizations change over time :) In the context of this work there are already separate approaches to handling versioning and change so org: defers to those. Though, in some applications you do want to explicitly represent the historical trace of those changes hence the inclusion of OPMV via org:ChangeEvent to give a minimal foundation for that. Cheers, Dave -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen President CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
Re: Organization ontology
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Kingsley Idehen kide...@openlinksw.com wrote: Peristeras, Vassilios wrote: Hello all, I have the feeling that we are (at least partly) reinventing the wheel here. There have been several initiatives drafting generic models and representations for organizations. Just two examples below [1][2] which go back to 90ies. More generally, an in-depth look at design and data patterns literature could also help a lot. I have the feeling that others before this group have defined concepts like organization, legal entity etc... We could re-use their conceptual (or data or formal) models, instead of starting the discussion from scratch. Best regards, Vassilios [1] http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/enterprise/enterprise/ontology.html [2] http://www.eil.utoronto.ca/enterprise-modelling/tove/ Both of your links point to PDFs or Postscript docs. Are there any actual ontology doc URLs? The enterprise ontology page is HTML and describes availability as The formal Ontolingua encoding of the Enterprise Ontology is held in the Library of Ontologies maintained by Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab (KSL). http://www-ksl-svc.stanford.edu:5915/FRAME-EDITOR/UID-15908sid=ANONYMOUSuser-id=ALIEN Last modified: Monday, 31 May 2010 sounds fresher than I expected. There's LISP here: http://www-ksl-svc.stanford.edu:5915/FRAME-EDITOR/UID-15901sid=ANONYMOUSuser-id=ALIEN#ENTERPRISE-ONTOLOGY I guess there must be an OWL conversion tool around somewhere. I've copied Mike Uschold who may have more to say on this... cheers, Dan
Re: Organization ontology
All, I personally am not aware of what the latest status of the Enterprise Ontology is. I would not assume that Last modified: Monday, 31 May 2010 means anything significant happened recently. I originally encoded the Enterprise Ontology into Ontolingua syntax, and there might have been a Ontolingua to DAML converter that someone ran on the KSL library of ontologies, and these might have been converted into OWL. Deborah McGuinness may know about this, having been at KSL for when the DAML and OWL were created. For what it is worth, I regularly get inquiries about the Enterprise Ontology, maybe a few a year, so it seems to still be getting some active use, at least from the point of view of its core concepts, if not a formal version. Having said that, the Enterprise ontology is not very large, and it would be a modest effort to create an OWL version of it from scratch - based on the paper. I'll be happy do to it, if there are some resources available. A blast from the past! Michael On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Dan Brickley dan...@danbri.org wrote: On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Kingsley Idehen kide...@openlinksw.com wrote: Peristeras, Vassilios wrote: Hello all, I have the feeling that we are (at least partly) reinventing the wheel here. There have been several initiatives drafting generic models and representations for organizations. Just two examples below [1][2] which go back to 90ies. More generally, an in-depth look at design and data patterns literature could also help a lot. I have the feeling that others before this group have defined concepts like organization, legal entity etc... We could re-use their conceptual (or data or formal) models, instead of starting the discussion from scratch. Best regards, Vassilios [1] http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/enterprise/enterprise/ontology.html [2] http://www.eil.utoronto.ca/enterprise-modelling/tove/ Both of your links point to PDFs or Postscript docs. Are there any actual ontology doc URLs? The enterprise ontology page is HTML and describes availability as The formal Ontolingua encoding of the Enterprise Ontology is held in the Library of Ontologies maintained by Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab (KSL). http://www-ksl-svc.stanford.edu:5915/FRAME-EDITOR/UID-15908sid=ANONYMOUSuser-id=ALIEN Last modified: Monday, 31 May 2010 sounds fresher than I expected. There's LISP here: http://www-ksl-svc.stanford.edu:5915/FRAME-EDITOR/UID-15901sid=ANONYMOUSuser-id=ALIEN#ENTERPRISE-ONTOLOGY I guess there must be an OWL conversion tool around somewhere. I've copied Mike Uschold who may have more to say on this... cheers, Dan -- Michael Uschold, PhD LinkedIn: http://tr.im/limfu Skype: UscholdM
Re: Organization ontology
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Congratulations on the publication of this ontology! I've added it to Schemapedia here: http://schemapedia.com/schemas/org I noticed a small semantic typo in the example at the end of section 3. skos:preferredLabel should be skos:prefLabel Ian
Re: Organization ontology
On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 09:34 +0100, Ian Davis wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Congratulations on the publication of this ontology! I've added it to Schemapedia here: http://schemapedia.com/schemas/org Thanks Ian. I noticed a small semantic typo in the example at the end of section 3. skos:preferredLabel should be skos:prefLabel Fixed. Cheers, Dave
Re: Organization ontology
On 06/08/2010 12:27 AM, 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? Sorry for jumping in. I was thinking that a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to be more precise. b) what happens when organizations change legal status? More on the latter - If you'd like to make having evolving graphs easier, you might as well make some legal-status a property and have anyone use URIs that work best for them. Which BTW makes adoption easier as well; Gov's might even pick it up and adapt to their local legal definitions of organization types or something, but any logic code made for plain old Organization will know how to deal with those. Cheers, Manos -- Manos Batsis, Chief Technologist ___ _/ /_ (_)_ __ / __ `/ __ \/ / ___/ ___// __ `/ ___/ / /_/ / /_/ / (__ |__ )/ /_/ / / \__,_/_.___/_//(_)__, /_/ // http://www.Abiss.gr 19, Kalvou Street, 14231, Nea Ionia, Athens, Greece Tel: +30 211-1027-900 Fax: +30 211-1027-999 http://gr.linkedin.com/in/manosbatsis attachment: manos.vcf
Re: Organization ontology
I can see Manos' point. It seems that LegalEntity rather the Organization would work well under a sub-domain such as .LAW or .DOJ or .SEC, but under other sub-domains such as .NASA, the Organization element might be better served as ProjectName. All instances would help specify the Organization type, while keeping Organization as the general unstylized element is probably ideal, as inferred by William Waites. Michael A. Norton From: Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) ma...@abiss.gr a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to be more precise.
Re: Organization ontology
Indeed. But isn't the case that for every single website, there is a single LegalEntity to attach it to, use cases otherwise paired downward on the spectrum--or attributed to--after that? Michael A. Norton From: Patrick Logan patrickdlo...@gmail.com To: Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.com Cc: public-egov...@w3.org; Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com; William Waites william.wai...@okfn.org; Linked Data community public-lod@w3.org; William Waites ww-keyword-okfn.193...@styx.org; Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) ma...@abiss.gr Sent: Mon, June 7, 2010 4:50:03 PM Subject: Re: Organization ontology Large corporations often have multiple legal entities and many informal, somewhat overlapping business organizations. Just saying. I wrangled with that. There're several different use cases for these for internal vs external, customer/vendor, financial vs operations, etc. On Jun 7, 2010 3:19 PM, Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.com wrote: I can see Manos' point. It seems that LegalEntity rather the Organization would work well under a sub-domain such as .LAW or .DOJ or .SEC, but under other sub-domains such as .NASA, the Organization element might be better served as ProjectName. All instances would help specify the Organization type, while keeping Organization as the general unstylized element is probably ideal, as inferred by William Waites. Michael A. Norton From: Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) ma...@abiss.gr a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to be more precise
RE: Organization ontology
In the law, there are two concepts (a) Person and (b) Entity. In simple terms: A person is a human. An entity is a non-human. Generally, these terms are used to distinguish who has the capacity to sue, be sued, or who lacks the capacity to sue or be sued. A person (human) can sue or be sued in an individual capacity, with certain exceptions for juveniles, those who are legally insane, or who otherwise are deemed or adjudicated under the law to lack legal capacity. An entity must exist as a legal person under the laws of a state. An entity's existence under the laws of a state occurs either through registration (usually with the secretary of state) or by operation of law (can happen with a partnership). Generally, anything else is not a entity. For example, you cannot sue a group of people on a beach as a entity - you would have to name each person individually. This is true, because the group of people on a beach typically have done nothing to form a legally recognized entity. From a legal perspective, calling something a Legal Entity is redundant; although from a non-legal perspective, it may provide clarity. In contrast a legal person is not redundant because most legal minds would understand this to mean an entity (i.e., a person with the capacity to sue and be sued that is not a human person). From a data modeling perspective, I find it straightforward to use the terms Person and Organization because (a) typically only lawyers understand Entity and (b) the data model for an organization tends to work for both (legal) entities and for organizations that might not fully meet the legal requirements for an entity. Taking the example below, a large corporation or government agency (both of which are [legal] entities) might be organized into non-legal divisions, subdivisions, departments, groups, etc, that are not (legal) entities but still might operate like, and need to be named as, an organization. Some companies have subsidiaries that are legal (entities). By adding OrganizationType to the Organization data model, you provide the ability to modify the type of organization and can then represent both (legal) entities and (legally unrecognized) organizations. Taxing authorities (e.g., the IRS) have different classifications for entities. An S Corporation, C Corporation, and a Non-Profit Corporation are all (legal) entities, even though their tax status differs. Hope this is helpful for what it is worth. Todd See also U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 17. From: public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Logan Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 7:50 PM To: Mike Norton Cc: public-egov...@w3.org; Dave Reynolds; William Waites; Linked Data community; William Waites; Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) Subject: Re: Organization ontology Large corporations often have multiple legal entities and many informal, somewhat overlapping business organizations. Just saying. I wrangled with that. There're several different use cases for these for internal vs external, customer/vendor, financial vs operations, etc. On Jun 7, 2010 3:19 PM, Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.commailto:xsideofparad...@yahoo.com wrote: I can see Manos' point. It seems that LegalEntity rather the Organization would work well under a sub-domain such as .LAW or .DOJ or .SEC, but under other sub-domains such as .NASA, the Organization element might be better served as ProjectName. All instances would help specify the Organization type, while keeping Organization as the general unstylized element is probably ideal, as inferred by William Waites. Michael A. Norton From: Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) ma...@abiss.grmailto:ma...@abiss.gr a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to be more precise
RE: Organization ontology
In case this is helpful, the following are the high-level templates I typically
use when modeling Person and Organization. These can/do change based on the
application. One of the goals of these structures is to keep the two objects
as similar as possible.
Organization
organizat...@organizaitontype
- Name (1)
- AlternateNames (0-many)
- ContactPerson (0-1)
- Addresses (0-many)
- Phones (0-many)
- Emails (0-many)
- Websites (0-many)
- Identifiers (0-many)
- Roles (0-many)
-- Name (1)
-- Identifier (1)
-- RoleAssociations (0-many)
Person
- Name (1)
- AlternateNames (0-many)
- ContactOrganization (0-1)
- Addresses (0-many)
- Phones (0-many)
- Emails (0-many)
- Websites (0-many)
- Identifiers (0-many)
- Descriptions (0-many)
- Roles (0-many)
-- Name (1)
-- Identifier (1)
-- RoleAssociations (0-many)
The content models for Name, AlternateName and Identifiers differ for Person
and Organization; Organization includes @OrganizationType, and ContactPerson
and ContactOrganization are switched, but otherwise the model is the same.
This is not intended to be a one size fits all model. Different applications
have different needs. This is just one way to do it that I have found works
well in a number of situations.
Again, hope this is helpful,
Todd
-Original Message-
From: public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org [mailto:public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Emmanouil Batsis (Manos)
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 6:04 PM
To: William Waites
Cc: William Waites; Dave Reynolds; Linked Data community; public-egov...@w3.org
Subject: Re: Organization ontology
On 06/08/2010 12:27 AM, 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?
Sorry for jumping in. I was thinking that
a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called LegalEntity to
be more precise.
b) what happens when organizations change legal status?
More on the latter - If you'd like to make having evolving graphs easier, you
might as well make some legal-status a property and have anyone use URIs that
work best for them.
Which BTW makes adoption easier as well; Gov's might even pick it up and adapt
to their local legal definitions of organization types or something, but any
logic code made for plain old Organization will know how to deal with those.
Cheers,
Manos
--
Manos Batsis, Chief Technologist
___
_/ /_ (_)_ __
/ __ `/ __ \/ / ___/ ___// __ `/ ___/
/ /_/ / /_/ / (__ |__ )/ /_/ / /
\__,_/_.___/_//(_)__, /_/
//
http://www.Abiss.gr
19, Kalvou Street,
14231, Nea Ionia,
Athens, Greece
Tel: +30 211-1027-900
Fax: +30 211-1027-999
http://gr.linkedin.com/in/manosbatsis
RE: Organization ontology
Mike: I purposely am avoiding using OrganizationType . . . Note that: Tax Status = C Corp, S-Corp, Non-Profit Entity (Types) (Private) = Corporation, Limited Liability Company (LLC), Partnership, Limited Liability Partnership, Trust (there are others) Entity (Types) (Public) = State, County, Municipality, Agency, Court, Parrish (there are others) The above are U.S. terms, not international. I use Roles and RoleAssociations to show relationships among unique people and organizations. ABC, Inc. - Role = Parent Company - Identifer = ABC001 - RoleAssociation = XYZ001 XYZ, Inc. - Role = Subsidiary - Identifier = XYZ001 - RoleAssociation = ABC001 Jason Taylor - Role = CEO - Identifier = CEO001 - RoleAssociation = ABC001 - Role = Shareholder - Identifier = Shareholder001 - RoleAssociation = XYZ001 I use alternate names to refer to the same person or entity using a different name. ABC, Inc. dba Neighborhood Pool Cleaners Organization - Name = ABC, Inc. - AlternateName = Neighborhood Pool Cleaners - alternaten...@alternatenametype = Doing Business As Use sunscreen. ☺ Todd From: Mike Norton [mailto:xsideofparad...@yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2010 12:14 AM To: Todd Vincent Cc: Patrick Logan; public-egov...@w3.org; Dave Reynolds; William Waites; Linked Data community; William Waites; Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) Subject: Re: Organization ontology Thanks for this, Todd. Personally, I love the persons on a beach scenario, because it is provocative and, quite simply, persons on a beach! I was looking at Organization as an outsider of the legal profession , referring to LegalEntity with C-Corps, S-Corps, and such in mind. OrganizationType would be a great attribute to help further delineate the complex web of organizations that do comprise the space, and perhaps further describe the Organization's Merger status, Acquisition status, or other Exchange-relative markup. Michael A. Norton From: Todd Vincent todd.vinc...@xmllegal.org To: Patrick Logan patrickdlo...@gmail.com; Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.com Cc: public-egov...@w3.org public-egov...@w3.org; Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com; William Waites william.wai...@okfn.org; Linked Data community public-lod@w3.org; William Waites ww-keyword-okfn.193...@styx.org; Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) ma...@abiss.gr Sent: Mon, June 7, 2010 8:27:11 PM Subject: RE: Organization ontology In the law, there are two concepts (a) Person and (b) Entity. In simple terms: A person is a human. An entity is a non-human. Generally, these terms are used to distinguish who has the capacity to sue, be sued, or who lacks the capacity to sue or be sued. A person (human) can sue or be sued in an individual capacity, with certain exceptions for juveniles, those who are legally insane, or who otherwise are deemed or adjudicated under the law to lack legal capacity. An entity must exist as a legal person under the laws of a state. An entity's existence under the laws of a state occurs either through registration (usually with the secretary of state) or by operation of law (can happen with a partnership). Generally, anything else is not a entity. For example, you cannot sue a group of people on a beach as a entity – you would have to name each person individually. This is true, because the group of people on a beach typically have done nothing to form a legally recognized entity. From a legal perspective, calling something a Legal Entity is redundant; although from a non-legal perspective, it may provide clarity. In contrast a legal person is not redundant because most legal minds would understand this to mean an entity (i.e., a person with the capacity to sue and be sued that is not a human person). From a data modeling perspective, I find it straightforward to use the terms Person and Organization because (a) typically only lawyers understand Entity and (b) the data model for an organization tends to work for both (legal) entities and for organizations that might not fully meet the legal requirements for an entity. Taking the example below, a large corporation or government agency (both of which are [legal] entities) might be organized into non-legal divisions, subdivisions, departments, groups, etc, that are not (legal) entities but still might operate like, and need to be named as, an organization. Some companies have subsidiaries that are legal (entities). By adding OrganizationType to the Organization data model, you provide the ability to modify the type of organization and can then represent both (legal) entities and (legally unrecognized) organizations. Taxing authorities (e.g., the IRS) have different classifications for entities. An S Corporation, C Corporation, and a Non-Profit Corporation are all (legal) entities, even though their tax status differs. Hope this is helpful for what it is worth. Todd See also U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 17
Re: Organization ontology
Thanks to everyone for the good feedback and comments. I've made some small changes to the ontology based on all the feedback. These are largely small bug fixes and (hopefully) improvements in documentation. The significant changes include: * addition of a transitive version of org:subOrganizationOf * improved mapping to foaf * reversed direction of org:resultingOrganzation (to be org:resultedFrom) for corrected compatibility with OPMV The full set of changes are listed in the updated documentation [1]. Dave [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html#changes On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 08:50 +0100, Dave Reynolds wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. The ontology is documented at [1] and some discussion on the requirements and design process are at [2]. W3C have been kind enough to offer to host the ontology within the W3C namespace [3]. This does not imply that W3C endorses the ontology, nor that it is part of any standards process at this stage. They are simply providing a stable place for posterity. Any changes to the ontology involving removal of, or modification to, existing terms (but not necessarily addition of new terms) will be announced to these lists. We suggest that any discussion take place on the public-lod list to avoid further cross-posting. Dave, Jeni, John [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html [2] http://www.epimorphics.com/web/category/category/developers/organization-ontology [3] http://www.w3.org/ns/org# (available in RDF/XML, N3, Turtle via conneg or append .rdf/.n3/.ttl)
Re: Organization ontology
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 17:06 +1200, Stuart A. Yeates wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. Interesting. We tried to keep the ontology reasonably neutral, that's why, for example, there is no notion of a Government or Corporation. Could you say a little more about the specific Western Westminster assumptions that you feel are built into it? (*) that structure is relatively static with sharp transitions between states. (*) that an organisation has a single structure rather than a set of structures depending on the operations you are concerned with (finance, governance, authority, criminal justice, ...) (*) that the structures are intended to be as they are, rather than being steps towards some kind of Platonic ideal ... Modelling the crime organisations (the mafia, drug runners, Enron, identity crime syndicates) may also be helpful in exposing assumptions, particularly those in mapping the real-world to legal entities. Alternatively, this may help in defining the subset of organisations that you're trying to model. Control is a different issue from organizational structure. This ontology is not designed to support reasoning about authority and governance models. There are Enterprise Ontologies that explicitly model authority, accountability and empowerment flows and it would be possible to create a generic one which bolted alongside org but org is not such a beast :) I suspect I may have mis-understood the subset of problems you're trying to solve. A statement such as the above in the ontology document might save others making the same mistake. cheers stuart
Re: Organization ontology
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 17:06 +1200, Stuart A. Yeates wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. Interesting. We tried to keep the ontology reasonably neutral, that's why, for example, there is no notion of a Government or Corporation. Could you say a little more about the specific Western Westminster assumptions that you feel are built into it? (*) that structure is relatively static with sharp transitions between states. This simplification pretty much comes 'out of the box' with the use of RDF or other simple logics (SQL too). Nothing we do here deals in a very fluid manner with an ever-changing, subtle and complex world. But still SQL and increasingly RDF can be useful tools, and used carefully I don't think they're instruments of western cultural imperialism. I don't find anything particularly troublesome about the org: vocab on this front. If you really want to critique culturally-loaded ontologies, I'd go find one that declares class hierarchies with terms like 'Terrorist' without giving any operational definitions... (*) that an organisation has a single structure rather than a set of structures depending on the operations you are concerned with (finance, governance, authority, criminal justice, ...) Couldn't the subOrganizationOf construct be used to allow these different aspects be described and then grouped loosly together? (*) that the structures are intended to be as they are, rather than being steps towards some kind of Platonic ideal I'm not getting that from the docs. For example, We felt that the best approach was to develop a small, generic, reusable core ontology for organizational information and then let developers extend and specialize it to particular domains. ...suggests a hope for incremental refinement / improvement, but also a hope that the basic pieces are likely to map onto multiple parties situations at a higher level. Bit of both there, but no Plato. ... Modelling the crime organisations (the mafia, drug runners, Enron, identity crime syndicates) may also be helpful in exposing assumptions, particularly those in mapping the real-world to legal entities. I agree these are interesting areas to attempt to describe, but dealing with situations where obfuscation, secrecy and complexity are core business is a tough stress-test of any model. Ontology-style modeling works best when there is a shared conceptualisation of what's going on; even many direct participants in these complex crime situations lack that. So I'd suggest for those situations taking a more evidence-based social networks approach; instead of saying here's their org chart, build things up from raw data of who emails who, who knows who, who met who, where and when (or who claimed that they did), etc. RDF is ok for that task too. Those techniques are also useful when understanding how more legitimate organizations really function, but (as mentioned w.r.t. accountability) it can largely be broken out as a separate descriptive problem. Alternatively, this may help in defining the subset of organisations that you're trying to model. Yup Control is a different issue from organizational structure. This ontology is not designed to support reasoning about authority and governance models. There are Enterprise Ontologies that explicitly model authority, accountability and empowerment flows and it would be possible to create a generic one which bolted alongside org but org is not such a beast :) I suspect I may have mis-understood the subset of problems you're trying to solve. A statement such as the above in the ontology document might save others making the same mistake. Perhaps the scope is organizations in which there is some ideal that all participants can share a common explicit understanding of (the basics of) how things work - who does roughly what, and what the main aggregations of activity are. Companies, clubs, societies, public sector bodies etc. Sure there will be old-boy networks, secret handshakes and all kinds of undocumented channels, but those are understood as routing-around the main tranparent shared picture of how the organization works (or should work).
Re: Organization ontology
On 10-06-03 09:01, Dan Brickley wrote:
I don't find anything particularly troublesome about the org: vocab on
this front. If you really want to critique culturally-loaded
ontologies, I'd go find one that declares class hierarchies with terms
like 'Terrorist' without giving any operational definitions...
I must admit when I looked at the org vocabulary I had a feeling
that there were some assumptions buried in it but discarded a
couple of draft emails trying to articulate it.
I think it stems from org:FormalOrganization being a thing that is
legally recognized and org:OrganizationalUnit (btw, any
particular reason for using the North American spelling here?)
being an entity that is not recognised outside of the FormalOrg
Organisations can become recognised in some circumstances
despite never having solicited outside recognition from a state --
this might happen in a court proceeding after some collective
wrongdoing. Conversely you might have something that can
behave like a kind of organisation, e.g. a class in a class-action
lawsuit without the internal structure present it most organisations.
Is a state an Organisation?
Organisational units can often be semi-autonomous (e.g. legally
recognised) subsidiaries of a parent or holding company. What
about quangos or crown-corporations (e.g. corporations owned
by the state). They have legal recognition but are really like
subsidiaries or units.
Some types of legally recognised organisations don't have a
distinct legal personality, e.g. a partnership or unincorporated
association so they cannot be said to have rights and responsibilities,
rather the members have joint (or joint and several) rights and
responsibilities. This may seem like splitting hairs but from a
legal perspective its an important distinction at least in some
legal environments. The description provided in the vocabulary
is really only true for corporations or limited companies.
I think the example, eg:contract1 is misleading since this is
an inappropriate way to model a contract. A contract has two
or more parties. A contract might include a duty to fill a role
on the part of one party but it is not normally something that
has to do with membership
Membership usually has a particular meaning as applied to
cooperatives and not-for-profits. They usually wring their hands
extensively about what exactly membership means. This concept
normally doesn't apply to other types of organisations and does
not normally have much to do with the concept of a role. The
president of ${big_corporation} cannot be said to have any kind
of membership relationship to that corporation, for example.
I think there might be more, but I don't think its a problem of
embedding westminister assumptions because I don't think
the vocabulary fits very well even in the UK and commonwealth
countries when you start looking at it closely.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
-w
--
William Waites william.wai...@okfn.org
Mob: +44 789 798 9965Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948Edinburgh, UK
Re: Organization ontology
Is any sample instance data available, whether it's using real or fake organizations? thanks, Bob
Re: Organization ontology
On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 09:29 -0400, Bob DuCharme wrote: Is any sample instance data available, whether it's using real or fake organizations? Not yet, but there will be. Dave
Re: Organization ontology
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:07 PM, William Waites william.wai...@okfn.org wrote:
On 10-06-03 09:01, Dan Brickley wrote:
I don't find anything particularly troublesome about the org: vocab on
this front. If you really want to critique culturally-loaded
ontologies, I'd go find one that declares class hierarchies with terms
like 'Terrorist' without giving any operational definitions...
I must admit when I looked at the org vocabulary I had a feeling
that there were some assumptions buried in it but discarded a
couple of draft emails trying to articulate it.
I think it stems from org:FormalOrganization being a thing that is
legally recognized and org:OrganizationalUnit (btw, any
particular reason for using the North American spelling here?)
Re spelling - fair question. I think there are good reasons. British
spelling accepts both. FOAF, which was made largely in Bristol UK but
with international participants, has used 'Z' spelling for nearly a
decade, http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Organization ... as far as I
know without any complaints. I'm really happy to see this detailed
work happen and hope to nudge FOAF a little too, perhaps finding a
common form of words to define the shared general Org class.
It would be pretty unfortunate to have foaf:Organization and
org:Organisation; much worse imho than the camel-case vs underscore
differences that show up within and between vocabularies. Z seems the
pragmatic choice.
I don't know much about English usage outside the UK and the northern
Americas, but I find 'z' is generally accepted in the UK, whereas in
the US, 's' is seen as a mistake. This seems supported by whoever
wrote this bit of wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-ise.2C_-ize_.28-isation.2C_-ization.29
American spelling accepts only -ize endings in most cases, such as
organize, realize, and recognize.[53] British usage accepts both -ize
and -ise (organize/organise, realize/realise,
recognize/recognise).[53] British English using -ize is known as
Oxford spelling, and is used in publications of the Oxford University
Press, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as other
authoritative British sources.
being an entity that is not recognised outside of the FormalOrg
Organisations can become recognised in some circumstances
despite never having solicited outside recognition from a state --
this might happen in a court proceeding after some collective
wrongdoing. Conversely you might have something that can
behave like a kind of organisation, e.g. a class in a class-action
lawsuit without the internal structure present it most organisations.
Yes. In FOAF we have a class foaf:Project but it is not quite clear
how best to characteri[sz]e it. In purely FOAF oriented scenarios, I
believe it is hardly ever used (although humm stats below seem to
contradict that). However, the pretty successful DOAP project
('description of a project') has made extensive use of a subclass,
doap:Project in describing open source collaborative projects. These
have something of the character of an organization, but are usually on
the bazaar end of the cathedral/bazzar spectrum.
Are some but not all projects also organizations? etc. discuss :)
See also http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Project
http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap
http://sindice.com/search?q=foaf:project+qt=term
Search results for terms “foaf:project ”, found about 13.0 thousand
(sindice seems to require downcasing for some reason)
http://sindice.com/search?q=doap:project+qt=term
Search results for terms “doap:project ”, found about 8.41 thousand
(I haven't time to dig into those results, probably the queries could
be tuned better to filter out some misleading matches)
Is a state an Organisation?
It would be great to link if possible to FAO's Geopolitical ontology
here, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitical_ontology ... this
for example has a model for groupings that geo-political entities
belong to (I'm handwaving a bit here on the detail). It also has a
class Organization btw, as well as extensive mappings to different
coding systems.
Organisational units can often be semi-autonomous (e.g. legally
recognised) subsidiaries of a parent or holding company. What
about quangos or crown-corporations (e.g. corporations owned
by the state). They have legal recognition but are really like
subsidiaries or units.
As an aside, I would like to have a way of representing boards of
directors, to update the old (theyrule-derrived) FOAFCorp data and
schema. Ancient page here: http://rdfweb.org/foafcorp/intro.html
schema http://xmlns.com/foaf/corp/
Some types of legally recognised organisations don't have a
distinct legal personality, e.g. a partnership or unincorporated
association so they cannot be said to have rights and responsibilities,
rather the members have joint (or joint and several) rights and
responsibilities. This may seem like splitting hairs but from a
Re: Organization ontology
of organisations and does
not normally have much to do with the concept of a role.
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.
At a minimum I'll add some discussion in that part of the document to
clarify the breadth of relations that org:Membership and org:memberOf
are intended to encompass.
I'm also open to suggestions if there is a compelling alternative name,
though we only have a small window in which to make further changes
before we have legacy data worry about :)
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.
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.
Dave
[1]
http://www.epimorphics.com/web/wiki/organization-ontology-first-draft
[2] http://www.epimorphics.com/web/wiki/organization-ontology-survey
Re: Organization ontology
Weren't these details of the discussion the sort of Mission Creep the org
vocabulary meant to avoid ? Certainly NGO's including Commercial Interests
would like nothing better than to ride the trustworthiness coattails of a
Geo-Political State. But the State is trustworthy precisely because it does
not render services to groups, averages or price points, but rather to
individuals. Current Industry Standards simply do not protect personal
privacy adequately while Government Standards must do so.
The org vocabulary has no provision for redaction of what might be private
personal information after the next election. But that is not necessary if one
is only making the general distinction between Official Function and Functional
Office. The problem arises with the introduction of Office Function. Forgive
me for arguing semantics :)
--- On Thu, 6/3/10, Dan Brickley dan...@danbri.org wrote:
On 10-06-03 09:01, Dan Brickley wrote:
I don't find anything particularly troublesome
about the org: vocab on
this front. If you really want to critique
culturally-loaded
ontologies, I'd go find one that declares class
hierarchies with terms
like 'Terrorist' without giving any operational
definitions...
I must admit when I looked at the org vocabulary I had
a feeling
that there were some assumptions buried in it but
discarded a
couple of draft emails trying to articulate it.
I think it stems from org:FormalOrganization being a
thing that is
legally recognized and org:OrganizationalUnit (btw,
any
particular reason for using the North American
spelling here?)
Re spelling - fair question. I think there are good
reasons. British
spelling accepts both. FOAF, which was made largely in
Bristol UK but
with international participants, has used 'Z' spelling for
nearly a
decade, http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Organization ... as
far as I
know without any complaints. I'm really happy to see this
detailed
work happen and hope to nudge FOAF a little too, perhaps
finding a
common form of words to define the shared general Org
class.
It would be pretty unfortunate to have foaf:Organization
and
org:Organisation; much worse imho than the camel-case vs
underscore
differences that show up within and between vocabularies. Z
seems the
pragmatic choice.
I don't know much about English usage outside the UK and
the northern
Americas, but I find 'z' is generally accepted in the UK,
whereas in
the US, 's' is seen as a mistake. This seems supported by
whoever
wrote this bit of wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-ise.2C_-ize_.28-isation.2C_-ization.29
American spelling accepts only -ize endings in most
cases, such as
organize, realize, and recognize.[53] British usage accepts
both -ize
and -ise (organize/organise, realize/realise,
recognize/recognise).[53] British English using -ize is
known as
Oxford spelling, and is used in publications of the Oxford
University
Press, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary, as well
as other
authoritative British sources.
being an entity that is not recognised outside of the
FormalOrg
Organisations can become recognised in some
circumstances
despite never having solicited outside recognition
from a state --
this might happen in a court proceeding after some
collective
wrongdoing. Conversely you might have something that
can
behave like a kind of organisation, e.g. a class in
a class-action
lawsuit without the internal structure present it most
organisations.
Yes. In FOAF we have a class foaf:Project but it is not
quite clear
how best to characteri[sz]e it. In purely FOAF oriented
scenarios, I
believe it is hardly ever used (although humm stats below
seem to
contradict that). However, the pretty successful DOAP
project
('description of a project') has made extensive use of a
subclass,
doap:Project in describing open source collaborative
projects. These
have something of the character of an organization, but are
usually on
the bazaar end of the cathedral/bazzar spectrum.
Are some but not all projects also organizations? etc.
discuss :)
See also http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Project
http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap
http://sindice.com/search?q=foaf:project+qt=term
Search results for terms “foaf:project ”, found about
13.0 thousand
(sindice seems to require downcasing for some reason)
http://sindice.com/search?q=doap:project+qt=term
Search results for terms “doap:project ”, found about
8.41 thousand
(I haven't time to dig into those results, probably the
queries could
be tuned better to filter out some misleading matches)
Is a state an Organisation?
It would be great to link if possible to FAO's Geopolitical
ontology
here, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitical_ontology ...
this
for example has a model for groupings that geo-political
entities
belong to (I'm handwaving
Re: Organization ontology
Dave, Does this mean that no sample data has been created yet, or that samples used in the course of development are not data that you are free to share? thanks, Bob Dave Reynolds wrote: On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 09:29 -0400, Bob DuCharme wrote: Is any sample instance data available, whether it's using real or fake organizations? Not yet, but there will be. Dave
Re: Organization ontology
On Thu, 2010-06-03 at 12:41 -0400, Bob DuCharme wrote: Dave, Does this mean that no sample data has been created yet, or that samples used in the course of development are not data that you are free to share? Given the rather ... short ... timescale we were working under the sketchy examples used in the course of development are not in a fit state to publish as examples of how to do things. There are several strands of work going on applying and specializing the ontology to real data and that will, I hope, result in publishable examples soon. Possibly, given that this work seems to have struck a chord with people, it might we worth generating a worked example sooner that isn't encumbered by the quality and completeness requirements that the real data has. Will think about that. Cheers, Dave
Re: Organization ontology
On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 17:06 +1200, Stuart A. Yeates wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. Interesting. We tried to keep the ontology reasonably neutral, that's why, for example, there is no notion of a Government or Corporation. Could you say a little more about the specific Western Westminster assumptions that you feel are built into it? We do have the notion of a Head role and corresponding headOf relation (because it is such a common notion and part of our competency questions) but there are no cardinality constraints and no requirement that any specific organizational structure support that role. What would be great would be to see a handful of different organisations (or portions of them) from different traditions modelled. Maybe: * The tripartite system at the top of US government, which seems pretty complex to me, with former Presidents apparently retaining some control after they leave office Control is a different issue from organizational structure. This ontology is not designed to support reasoning about authority and governance models. There are Enterprise Ontologies that explicitly model authority, accountability and empowerment flows and it would be possible to create a generic one which bolted alongside org but org is not such a beast :) Dave
Re: Organization ontology
To give some different perspective, I don't believe that any of those issues w/r/t to other governance models impinge on the quality or utility of this organization ontology whatever. Does it accurately depict every possible scenario? Not at all. Is it adequate for the use cases and requirements it was set out to achieve? It certainly appears that way. Further, governance is -- as Dave points out -- in some ways orthogonal to organizational structure (so, in some sense this is *not* true, in that some org structures prohibit or inhibit some control models, and vice versa, but that only matters here if it does, and I claim that it doesn't). This is -- as I said on Twitter last week -- outstanding work and we will be adopting adapting it in our work at NASA and other fed govt customers. Cheers, Kendall Clark On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:09 AM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 17:06 +1200, Stuart A. Yeates wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. Interesting. We tried to keep the ontology reasonably neutral, that's why, for example, there is no notion of a Government or Corporation. Could you say a little more about the specific Western Westminster assumptions that you feel are built into it? We do have the notion of a Head role and corresponding headOf relation (because it is such a common notion and part of our competency questions) but there are no cardinality constraints and no requirement that any specific organizational structure support that role. What would be great would be to see a handful of different organisations (or portions of them) from different traditions modelled. Maybe: * The tripartite system at the top of US government, which seems pretty complex to me, with former Presidents apparently retaining some control after they leave office Control is a different issue from organizational structure. This ontology is not designed to support reasoning about authority and governance models. There are Enterprise Ontologies that explicitly model authority, accountability and empowerment flows and it would be possible to create a generic one which bolted alongside org but org is not such a beast :) Dave
Organization ontology
We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. The ontology is documented at [1] and some discussion on the requirements and design process are at [2]. W3C have been kind enough to offer to host the ontology within the W3C namespace [3]. This does not imply that W3C endorses the ontology, nor that it is part of any standards process at this stage. They are simply providing a stable place for posterity. Any changes to the ontology involving removal of, or modification to, existing terms (but not necessarily addition of new terms) will be announced to these lists. We suggest that any discussion take place on the public-lod list to avoid further cross-posting. Dave, Jeni, John [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html [2] http://www.epimorphics.com/web/category/category/developers/organization-ontology [3] http://www.w3.org/ns/org# (available in RDF/XML, N3, Turtle via conneg or append .rdf/.n3/.ttl)
Re: Organization ontology
Dave, We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Brilliant! I submitted it now to Sindice [1] and 'registered' the org prefix in prefix.cc [2] - you might want to support it by voting it up ;) Cheers, Michael [1] http://sindice.com/search?q=domain%3Awww.w3.org+Core+organization+ontologyq t=term [2] http://prefix.cc/org -- Dr. Michael Hausenblas LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway Ireland, Europe Tel. +353 91 495730 http://linkeddata.deri.ie/ http://sw-app.org/about.html From: Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:50:32 +0100 To: Linked Data community public-lod@w3.org, public-egov...@w3.org public-egov...@w3.org Subject: Organization ontology Resent-From: public-egov...@w3.org public-egov...@w3.org Resent-Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:51:09 + We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. The ontology is documented at [1] and some discussion on the requirements and design process are at [2]. W3C have been kind enough to offer to host the ontology within the W3C namespace [3]. This does not imply that W3C endorses the ontology, nor that it is part of any standards process at this stage. They are simply providing a stable place for posterity. Any changes to the ontology involving removal of, or modification to, existing terms (but not necessarily addition of new terms) will be announced to these lists. We suggest that any discussion take place on the public-lod list to avoid further cross-posting. Dave, Jeni, John [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html [2] http://www.epimorphics.com/web/category/category/developers/organization-ontol ogy [3] http://www.w3.org/ns/org# (available in RDF/XML, N3, Turtle via conneg or append .rdf/.n3/.ttl)
Re: Organization ontology
Dave Reynolds wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. The ontology is documented at [1] and some discussion on the requirements and design process are at [2]. W3C have been kind enough to offer to host the ontology within the W3C namespace [3]. This does not imply that W3C endorses the ontology, nor that it is part of any standards process at this stage. They are simply providing a stable place for posterity. Any changes to the ontology involving removal of, or modification to, existing terms (but not necessarily addition of new terms) will be announced to these lists. We suggest that any discussion take place on the public-lod list to avoid further cross-posting. Fantastic! just what I need v glad to see it tied in with VCard, GR and FOAF, all 3 of which I'm using currently with a custom Ontology to handle the Organisation stuff, but this is much better! Great work, Nathan Dave, Jeni, John [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html [2] http://www.epimorphics.com/web/category/category/developers/organization-ontology [3] http://www.w3.org/ns/org# (available in RDF/XML, N3, Turtle via conneg or append .rdf/.n3/.ttl)
Re: Organization ontology
On 06/01/2010 10:26 AM, Michael Hausenblas wrote: Dave, We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Brilliant! I submitted it now to Sindice [1] and 'registered' the org prefix in prefix.cc [2] - you might want to support it by voting it up ;) Cheers, Michael [1] http://sindice.com/search?q=domain%3Awww.w3.org+Core+organization+ontologyq t=term [2] http://prefix.cc/org Nice. I've added it to CKAN: http://www.ckan.net/package/org_ontology Cheers, Christophe -- Dr. Christophe Guéret (cgue...@few.vu.nl) http://www.few.vu.nl/~cgueret/ Postdoc working on SOKS (http://www.few.vu.nl/soks) Knowledge Representation Reasoning Group Computational Intelligence Group Department of Computer Science, AI VU University Amsterdam attachment: cgueret.vcf
Re: Organization ontology
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 01/06/10 08:50, Dave Reynolds wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Looks good Dave. This is fairly close to AIISO [1], which I'm using for our university structure. I'll ping them to suggest adding subproperty mappings. Any changes to the ontology involving removal of, or modification to, existing terms (but not necessarily addition of new terms) will be announced to these lists. We suggest that any discussion take place on the public-lod list to avoid further cross-posting. Suggestion: skos provides property and propertyTransitive [2] as a transitive variant. I find this pattern useful for expressing the ground facts (dept unitOf faculty) and woolier inferences for navigation (dept unitOfTransitive univ). Damian [1] http://vocab.org/aiiso/schema [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#sectransitivebroader -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkwE1PIACgkQAyLCB+mTtyn15gCcD+GjDeafJ+6cNCgNZy9/KfkQ QSUAoIPUwK/PWA53L7VbqeFupCRSncUG =L8t0 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Organization ontology
On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 09:26 +0100, Michael Hausenblas wrote: Dave, We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Brilliant! I submitted it now to Sindice [1] and 'registered' the org prefix in prefix.cc [2] Thanks Michael. - you might want to support it by voting it up ;) Done :) Dave
Re: Organization ontology
On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 11:04 +0200, Christophe Guéret wrote: On 06/01/2010 10:26 AM, Michael Hausenblas wrote: Dave, We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Brilliant! I submitted it now to Sindice [1] and 'registered' the org prefix in prefix.cc [2] - you might want to support it by voting it up ;) Cheers, Michael [1] http://sindice.com/search?q=domain%3Awww.w3.org+Core+organization+ontologyq t=term [2] http://prefix.cc/org Nice. I've added it to CKAN: http://www.ckan.net/package/org_ontology Thanks. Great so see how easy it is to get such a vocabulary registered these days. Just mention it here and people leap to help you make it more widely discoverable! Dave
Re: Organization ontology
On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 10:37 +0100, Damian Steer wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 01/06/10 08:50, Dave Reynolds wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Looks good Dave. This is fairly close to AIISO [1], which I'm using for our university structure. I'll ping them to suggest adding subproperty mappings. Ah. I missed that one, despite having tried all the ontology search tools I could think of. Thanks for pointing it out. Any changes to the ontology involving removal of, or modification to, existing terms (but not necessarily addition of new terms) will be announced to these lists. We suggest that any discussion take place on the public-lod list to avoid further cross-posting. Suggestion: skos provides property and propertyTransitive [2] as a transitive variant. I find this pattern useful for expressing the ground facts (dept unitOf faculty) and woolier inferences for navigation (dept unitOfTransitive univ). Yes, that's a good suggestion. I've put that on list to add. Cheers, Dave
Re: Organization ontology
Hi Dave Great resource indeed. One remark, one suggestion, and one question :) Remark : Just found out what seems to be a mistake in the N3 file. org:role a owl:ObjectProperty, rdf:Property; rdfs:label role@en; rdfs:domain org:Membership; rdfs:range foaf:Agent; ... I guess one should read :rdfs:range org:Role Suggestion : I always feel uneasy with having class and property just distinct by upper/lower case. Suggest to change the property to org:hasRole Question : Will RDF-XML file available at some point? Keep the good work going Best Bernard 2010/6/1 Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. The ontology is documented at [1] and some discussion on the requirements and design process are at [2]. W3C have been kind enough to offer to host the ontology within the W3C namespace [3]. This does not imply that W3C endorses the ontology, nor that it is part of any standards process at this stage. They are simply providing a stable place for posterity. Any changes to the ontology involving removal of, or modification to, existing terms (but not necessarily addition of new terms) will be announced to these lists. We suggest that any discussion take place on the public-lod list to avoid further cross-posting. Dave, Jeni, John [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html [2] http://www.epimorphics.com/web/category/category/developers/organization-ontology [3] http://www.w3.org/ns/org# (available in RDF/XML, N3, Turtle via conneg or append .rdf/.n3/.ttl) -- Bernard Vatant Senior Consultant Vocabulary Data Engineering Tel: +33 (0) 971 488 459 Mail: bernard.vat...@mondeca.com Mondeca 3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France Web:http://www.mondeca.com Blog:http://mondeca.wordpress.com
Re: Organization ontology
Hi Bernard, On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 17:03 +0200, Bernard Vatant wrote: Hi Dave Great resource indeed. One remark, one suggestion, and one question :) Remark : Just found out what seems to be a mistake in the N3 file. org:role a owl:ObjectProperty, rdf:Property; rdfs:label role@en; rdfs:domain org:Membership; rdfs:range foaf:Agent; ... I guess one should read :rdfs:range org:Role Oops, thanks, will get that fixed shortly (hopefully tonight or tomorrow). Suggestion : I always feel uneasy with having class and property just distinct by upper/lower case. Suggest to change the property to org:hasRole Names are always hard! Some people have commented that I should just use nouns (e.g. see comments on [1]). My rationale has been that some relations (e.g. unitOf, subOrganizationOf) really need to have a direction indicated and so use phrases for those. Then for things that are clearly attributes use simple nouns. Other cases are grey. I've thought of the properties of org:Membership as being attributes of an n-ary relation and so gone for nouns there. This helps to avoid confusion with the direct relations - if I used org:hasRole then I ought to use org:hasMember which would clash with the short cut use of org:memberOf. Question : Will RDF-XML file available at some point? It is. Use content negotiation: curl -H Accept: application/rdf+xml http://www.w3.org/ns/org# or point your browser at http://www.w3.org/ns/org.rdf Cheers, Dave [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/web/wiki/organization-ontology-second-draft#comment-60
Re: Organization ontology
Dave Reynolds schrieb: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Great! This comes in due time :-) I was just looking for something like that. I'll take a deeper look at it. Kind regards, Angelo
Re: Organization ontology
Michael Hausenblas wrote: Dave, We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. Brilliant! I submitted it now to Sindice [1] and 'registered' the org prefix in prefix.cc [2] - you might want to support it by voting it up ;) Cheers, Michael [1] http://sindice.com/search?q=domain%3Awww.w3.org+Core+organization+ontologyq t=term [2] http://prefix.cc/org Dave, seeAlso: 1. http://uriburner.com/fct/facet.vsp?cmd=loadfsq_id=45 -- here its entity ranked 2. http://lod.openlinksw.com/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2Fns%2Forg%23Organization -- I suspect the ranking hasn't occurred so I used the URI lookup option . BTW - adding rdfs:isDefinedBy relations would make the ontology much more navigable via the interfaces above. -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen President CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
Re: Organization ontology
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. What would be great would be to see a handful of different organisations (or portions of them) from different traditions modelled. Maybe: * The tripartite system at the top of US government, which seems pretty complex to me, with former Presidents apparently retaining some control after they leave office * The governance model of the Vatican City and Catholic Church * The Asian royalty model, in which an informal royalty commonly appears to sit above a formal constitution cheers stuart
Re: Organization ontology
Good point! Sent from my iPhone On 02/06/2010, at 15:06, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. What would be great would be to see a handful of different organisations (or portions of them) from different traditions modelled. Maybe: * The tripartite system at the top of US government, which seems pretty complex to me, with former Presidents apparently retaining some control after they leave office * The governance model of the Vatican City and Catholic Church * The Asian royalty model, in which an informal royalty commonly appears to sit above a formal constitution cheers stuart
Re: Organization ontology
Cool! Let me know when that's ready. End of the week ok? ;P lol Sent from my iPhone On 02/06/2010, at 15:47, Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.com wrote: Or, in the U.S. we could just partition a new web with top level domains reflective of the agencies and departments financed by our tax dollars. Open Gov! Michael A. Norton From: Chris Beer ch...@e-beer.net.au To: Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com Cc: Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com; Linked Data community public-lod@w3.org; public-egov...@w3.org public-egov...@w3.org Sent: Tue, June 1, 2010 10:22:12 PM Subject: Re: Organization ontology Good point! Sent from my iPhone On 02/06/2010, at 15:06, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. What would be great would be to see a handful of different organisations (or portions of them) from different traditions modelled. Maybe: * The tripartite system at the top of US government, which seems pretty complex to me, with former Presidents apparently retaining some control after they leave office * The governance model of the Vatican City and Catholic Church * The Asian royalty model, in which an informal royalty commonly appears to sit above a formal constitution cheers stuart
Re: Organization ontology
Get Kurzweil to do it! Michael A. Norton From: Chris Beer ch...@e-beer.net.au To: Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.com Cc: Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com; Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com; Linked Data community public-lod@w3.org; public-egov...@w3.org public-egov...@w3.org Sent: Tue, June 1, 2010 10:49:57 PM Subject: Re: Organization ontology Cool! Let me know when that's ready. End of the week ok? ;P lol Sent from my iPhone On 02/06/2010, at 15:47, Mike Norton xsideofparad...@yahoo.com wrote: Or, in the U.S. we could just partition a new web with top level domains reflective of the agencies and departments financed by our tax dollars. Open Gov! Michael A. Norton From: Chris Beer ch...@e-beer.net.au To: Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com Cc: Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com; Linked Data community public-lod@w3.org; public-egov...@w3.org public-egov...@w3.org Sent: Tue, June 1, 2010 10:22:12 PM Subject: Re: Organization ontology Good point! Sent from my iPhone On 02/06/2010, at 15:06, Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Dave Reynolds dave.e.reyno...@googlemail.com wrote: We would like to announce the availability of an ontology for description of organizational structures including government organizations. This was motivated by the needs of the data.gov.uk project. After some checking we were unable to find an existing ontology that precisely met our needs and so developed this generic core, intended to be extensible to particular domains of use. [1] http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html I think this is great, but I'm a little worried that a number of Western (and specifically Westminister) assumptions may have been built into it. What would be great would be to see a handful of different organisations (or portions of them) from different traditions modelled. Maybe: * The tripartite system at the top of US government, which seems pretty complex to me, with former Presidents apparently retaining some control after they leave office * The governance model of the Vatican City and Catholic Church * The Asian royalty model, in which an informal royalty commonly appears to sit above a formal constitution cheers stuart
