Ontologies for organization description

[bfrichet3]

Dear Bart

I hope you are all right. I have a question concerning the best way of describing brussels regions' public organization in our web applications (like openbudgets or datastore). Would you recommand the use of Prov DM or the use of the FOAF ontology?

Thank you for your answer!

Regards and I wish you all the best for christmas

Regards

Benoît

[barthanssens]

Hello Benoît,

I guess it depends on what properties you'd like to describe: the structure of the organization itself ?

For organizations, there is :

• as you already mentioned, FOAF
• generic W3C ORG https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/
• some minor extensions in W3C ROV https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-regorg/
• and additional properties defined by SEMIC.eu in the CPOV https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/semic-support-centre/solution/core-public-organisation-vocabulary/release/210

(often a mix of FOAF / ORG will do)

If it's about roles and provenance, then of course the PROV ontologies are an excellent choice

Best regards

Bart

[bfrichet3]

Bart

Thank you for answer. Basically we want to provide these informations:

1. name
2. short description
3. logo/image
4. relations bewteen organizations (some General Directions of the SPBR want to have their own identity)

[barthanssens]

Sounds like a good match for W3C ORG and W3C ROV.

They allow for fine-grained description of organizations, and relations like "subOrganizationOf", "memberOf":

• org:Organization is subclass of foaf:Agent and equivalent to foaf:Organization, which can basically be anything
  (for small teams org:OrganizationalUnit is also useful)
• org:FormalOrganization is a subclass of org:Organization to indicate that an organization is, well, formal (e.g. Bruxelles Logement)
• rov:RegisteredOrganization is a subclass of org:FormalOrganization for organizations that are officially registered somewhere (e.g. in Crossroad bank Enterprises)

The ORG specification provides some nice examples, e.g. https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/#example-1

Since org:Organization is a subclass of foaf:Agent, and since RDF is very flexible, FOAF properties can be used for homepage, mailbox, logo...