Organizational Structures

Section 2.3.4 of GLD WG Charter addresses the use of standard vocabularies for Organizational Structures. This type of vocabulary will help government entities represent the unique details about their organization, structure, and roles as well as describe their internal and external relationships.

ORG ontology

The WG is focusing its efforts on adapting Epimorphics' Organization Ontology as a W3C Recommendation.

An Organization Ontology (Editor's Draft)

Possible scope

This may include:

• mission of government entity
• acronyms and/or historical name changes
• chain of command within organizational entity (reporting structure)
• relationships to other organizational entities (subagency of, wholly owned subsidiary of ..., etc.)
• logistics information (physical addresses of branches/offices, lat/long, etc.)
• contact information
  • contact type, e.g. operations, legal, et cetera
  • phone numbers
  • URLs
  • email addresses (via foaf, et cetera)
• capabilities to represent relationships within hierarchical, matrix, and flat organization structures
• job types/roles
• size
• date agency was established
• organizational identifiers (DUNS numbers, ticker symbols, BBG IDs)
• industrial classifications (NAICS/SIC Codes)
• facilities associated with the entity

Candidate ontologies

1. GoodRelations Business Entity http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1#BusinessEntity
2. An organization ontology by Epimorphics: http://www.epimorphics.com/public/vocabulary/org.html
   1. Associated requirements document: http://www.epimorphics.com/web/wiki/organization-ontology-requirements
   2. French translations for the label/comment/title strings: http://www.w3.org/ns/org#
3. Institutions and Bodies of the European Union: http://eu-institutions.appspot.com/ (contributed by Christophe Guéret)
4. Ontologies for eGov't: http://oegov.org (oeGOV is an initiative to establish ontologies of Governments)

Other information of interest

1. RPI "Instance Hub" URI design for federal agencies: http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/instance-hub-uri-design
2. EU's ISA Programme's SEMIC Core Vocabularies Working Group is producing a minimal set of terms necessary to identify a business (the 'Core Business Vocabulary'). This is very likely to use terms from the ontologies mentioned on this page.
3. Excellent article on the issue of identifiers for companies: On company identifiers, the web and reinventing the wheel
4. UDEF Enterprise Object Tree
5. schema.org/Organization