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MaastrichtU-IDS / cbcm-ontology

⚖️ An OWL ontology to define terms from EU company law that are relevant for cross-border mobility of EU companies.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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Model for acquisition/merger dynamics may be problematic #7

Open micheldumontier opened 4 years ago

micheldumontier commented 4 years ago

The use of indiscriminate predicates (e.g. involves) to point to individuals (e.g. a specific company) that are assigned role-based types (e.g. Acquiring company, Merging company) will fail as soon as one company is involved in both a merger and an acquisition (are part of different company transactions) - as they will be typed as both "Acquiring Company" and "Merging Company" and it won't be clear what role it had in either transaction. You can avoid this problem by either using specific predicates in the transaction (e.g. "has-acquisition-company" "has-merging-company"), or use transaction-unique instantiated roles ( involves some ('acquisition role'|'merging role' that 'is role of' some 'company').

kodymoodley commented 4 years ago

The point about using more specific predicates than 'involves' is super useful! Given the queries we want to ask about mergers and acquisitions, it is indeed important to agree on these sub-predicates. @marcus-meyer-maas I will fix this for the next release. As @micheldumontier says, "has-acquisition-company" "has-merging-company" are good places to start.