Make organisation (COB_0000025) a GDC?

[StroemPhi]

As there is the comment "Should revisit if we can place outside of material entity - a collection of roles." and @mconlon17 is working on an organization ontology that is supposed to be an expansion of IAO, I suggest to look into this with regard to a revision of organisation (COB_0000025).

[ddooley]

Indeed, understanding that an organization can be created or dissolved at the stroke of a pen, it has dependencies no other material entity has. (Whether its roles (e.g. ownership, service, contractual) are legitimate is entirely a function of local and / or global legislation - law - at some time t. Hobbesian! So I'd hope that its definition references that too.)

[mellybelly]

organizations also change membership and names over time, can be merged and split, and have properties of social (and legal) agreements. There are arguments for and against them being material entities. Ontologically they are quite interesting. @ShahimEssaid did some work on this in the VIVO-ISF back in the day.

[alanruttenberg]

Agreed they are complicated. I'd be curious about VIVO-ISF work, if there's a pointer.

There's a difference between the role and the organization. The organization role can be gained and lost, but this isn't very different from other things such as a passport. We wouldn't say a passport isn't a material entity. Or, you can cease being a nurse by decision of a licensing board. The nurse remains a material entity. So, all things being equal, I don't think that there's a problem with an organization being a material entity. The material entity that is the organization doesn't cease to exist once the organization is disbanded, it just loses the role.

Alan

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 1:05 PM Melissa Haendel @.***> wrote:

organizations also change membership and names over time, can be merged and split, and have properties of social (and legal) agreements. There are arguments for and against them being material entities. Ontologically they are quite interesting. @ShahimEssaid https://github.com/ShahimEssaid did some work on this in the VIVO-ISF back in the day.

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[ShahimEssaid]

It's been a while since I had an interest in this topic but it keeps coming up in other projects that are not that focused on a good model of organizations but still need instances of such entities. When I was trying to model some of this content, I was interested in following John Searl's approach for "social entities'', if that sounds familiar. Basically, an organization, at its most basic sense, is an abstract entity and it is a formalization of an informal "social group" with a clear purpose, recognition in some bigger context, etc.

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 1:31 PM Alan Ruttenberg @.***> wrote:

Agreed they are complicated. I'd be curious about VIVO-ISF work, if there's a pointer.

There's a difference between the role and the organization. The organization role can be gained and lost, but this isn't very different from other things such as a passport. We wouldn't say a passport isn't a material entity. Or, you can cease being a nurse by decision of a licensing board. The nurse remains a material entity. So, all things being equal, I don't think that there's a problem with an organization being a material entity. The material entity that is the organization doesn't cease to exist once the organization is disbanded, it just loses the role.

Alan

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 1:05 PM Melissa Haendel @.***> wrote:

organizations also change membership and names over time, can be merged and split, and have properties of social (and legal) agreements. There are arguments for and against them being material entities. Ontologically they are quite interesting. @ShahimEssaid https://github.com/ShahimEssaid did some work on this in the VIVO-ISF back in the day.

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[mconlon17]

Hi all. Yes Searle. I read both the books Shahim gave me: Construction of Social Reality, and Making the Social World.

Hi Melissa, Shahim -- it has been awhile, I hope you are well. And hello to everyone I haven't met.

Might be interesting to see the arguments for and against ME for Orgs and GDC for Orgs.

We likely all have first hand experience with the nature of organizations. As ddooley said above, people come and go. Documents defining and orgs come and go. Seems all orgs have founding processes -- formal and informal, but in all cases deontic, granting rights, privileges and responsibilities to the org that make the org quite different from a "group of people". The founding process typically results in the expression of "dispositions" -- in quotes because currently dispositions require a material entity for realization and we could discuss what that might be for an organization that itself might not be a material entity. Examples of these expressions: A company exists to make money for its shareholders, the NIH exists to conduct research to advance human health, a passenger airline exists to move passengers in planes from one location to another (and if the airline is a company, it also exists to make money for its owners).

Original VIVO work on organizations (which we found to be inadequate) is embedded in the VIVO ontology here: https://github.com/vivo-ontologies/vivo-ontology

Recent early/draft work to re-express organizations with BFO and in accord with OBO principles is here: https://github.com/mconlon17/organization-ontology

[cmungall]

I am not convinced a deep philosophical treatment helps here. I don't think most users care what we do, so long as it's simple. Do we even need to commit to a philosophical upper level? Can we use the Schulz disease strategy and define it as a union of all of the different upper level aspects?

Whatever is decided, I urge you all to keep it simple. If a user needs to use 4 levels of nesting just to relate a person to an organization (going through blank nodes for roles, GDCs, SDCs) then I don't think that is a success. I am also wary of any structure that encourages the creation of parallel duplicative shadow classes, e.g. physical orchestras and orchestra dispositions and orchestra processes and orchestra GDCs.

Even though I think the question of whether an organization has mass is irrelevant, the advantage of creating as material entity is that it keeps things simple. You can treat them the same way as other material entities that are collections, using straightforward well-understood parthood/membership relationships. They can be related in time/successor relationships the same way we do for other material entities.

[mellybelly]

that was my (admittedly cryptic) point ;-)- also just trying to define some basic requirements.

[alanruttenberg]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 3:20 PM Mike Conlon @.***> wrote:

Hi all. Yes Searle. I read both the books Shahim gave me: Construction of Social Reality, and Making the Social World.

Hi Melissa, Shahim -- it has been awhile, I hope you are well. And hello to everyone I haven't met.

Might be interesting to see the arguments for and against ME for Orgs and GDC for Orgs.

We likely all have first hand experience with the nature of organizations. As ddooley said above, people come and go. Documents defining and orgs come and go. Seems all orgs have founding processes -- formal and informal, but in all cases deontic, granting rights, privileges and responsibilities to the org that make the org quite different from a "group of people".

BFO's history includes an awareness of Searle, and the constructs are available to tell that story. It is true that an organization has people as members. So there's a material entity involved. A speech act or document act, according to BFO, is a process that gives rise to a role. An organization is different from a group of people in an analogous way that a group of men, or a group trained as a marching band - are "quite different" from a group of people. In each case there is the group of people as the parent class, and some differentia that is the difference between a subclass and the rest of the subclasses. In the case of biological sex it is a quality. In the case of the marching band it is a realizable entity of some sort - a role or a disposition. A group of men is a group of people that have a pato:male characteristic. etc.

Material entities, as continuants, can keep identity even as there is change. So members joining and leaving an organization is completely consistent with the organization being a group of people.

Depending on what you want to say about an organization, you might say it of the material entity or of the role or of a process. Talking about when the organization was formed is talking about when the organizational role that the group bears was created. Talking about appointment of a treasurer is talking about a realization of the organizational role as a process in which the treasurer role is created. Talking about when the organization was incorporated is talking about a document act in which the organization role was created.

As Chris says, you can keep it simple. In many cases you can say what you need to only talk about the material entity. Or, if you need to have a richer description you can represent the roles, the acts, etc. From BFO's point of view, and consistent with the open world assumption, all those things are there but it is your choice of what you assert, and what you assert is driven by your needs.

The founding process typically results in the expression of "dispositions" -- in quotes because currently dispositions require a material entity for realization and we could discuss what that might be for an organization that itself might not be a material entity. Examples of these expressions: A company exists to make money for its shareholders, the NIH exists to conduct research to advance human health, a passenger airline exists to move passengers in planes from one location to another (and if the airline is a company, it also exists to make money for its owners).

Original VIVO work on organizations (which we found to be inadequate) is embedded in the VIVO ontology here: https://github.com/vivo-ontologies/vivo-ontology

Recent early/draft work to re-express organizations with BFO and in accord with OBO principles is here: https://github.com/mconlon17/organization-ontology

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[mellybelly]

I would strongly urge us to consider the requirements of what is needed first and build off of that. It has been almost 15 years since we first started discussing modeling organizations in OBO! And we have never really gotten it addressed. ROR can provide the identifiers and registration system, but here are some of the things I need:

Relationships between people and orgs Relationships between orgs (especially temporal lumping and splitting and renaming) Membership and temporal changes in it people roles in a given organization changes in names over time remit and/or type of organizations (non profit, community, government, etc.) Partonomy identifiers for each part legal status

among other things. Should we document these somewhere? Excited that there is excitement, this has been plaguing us for very long time.

[ddooley]

Good idea to itemize requirements. I like the idea of solving this too just as "research organization" ontology is being developed. Would they host such a doc or spreadsheet?

Obviously, 15+ years in, it's a tough question. If we try to simplify this, and just call organization (government, corporation, nonprofit) physical, this may block OBO's ability to assimilate academic debate about sociological / law / business concepts, that is, not to be able to grow in the direction of soft science? (Or should I accept that a corporation is a legal person?! ;) )

Argument for GDC: Acid test: can an organization function without any people, say as a numbered account, and all the people are dead for a while and not yet replaced? Removing an organization's physicality may not legally remove the organization. It is discovered that a corporation no longer has any people; the court has ordered its dissolution on such and such a day. Various scenarios to test - but in the realm of document, legislation, or psychology - not via the hard sciences.

I know for simplicity if X,Y are of the same type then X 'has part' Y is possible. The relations often used to connect an organization with material entities, like "has resource", "has employee", "has asset", "has board", do not strike me as having a material entity for a subject - so this breaks that simple part-hood. We'd need a new top-level relation: "legal part of" with domain GCD, to class them under if organization is a GCD. Would that be enough to keep things simple?

[mconlon17]

Our requirements for organizations are very similar to those of Melissa above. See https://mconlon17.github.io/organization-ontology/en/master/domain-definition.html which could certainly be improved.

And yes, organizations can exist without people. They can be inherited in many jurisdictions. Organizations have assets (land, IP, cash) as well as people and declarations (legal or otherwise). And yes, perhaps they are a collection of all these things -- some material and some immaterial.

And agree about simplicity.

And agree about excitement. Representation of organizations is a good problem to be solved.

Curious about the research organization ontology. Why would this not be a subset of an organization ontology -- seems most (all?) of the issues are the same, research organizations focus on a particular set of activities and interests. We have tried to think about all organizations, of which research organizations are a subset.

[bpeters42]

It is great to see enthusiasm for picking up the work on defining 'organization' again. As that is being pursued, I would ask that we follow an equivalent of the Hippocratic 'first do no harm' principle for ontology development, and inspect what has been done so far and is currently in use. More than a decade ago, OBI took up trying to define 'organization' in the context of BFO and OBO, because the term was needed to describe funders, manufacturers, suppliers, universities etc. We had several years of discussion on multiple issue trackers, which were very much grounded on the concrete use-cases of the different teams wanting to use OBI. We ended up with the following term definition below, which is in use by >40 OBO ontologies

"An entity that can bear roles, has members, and has a set of organization rules. Members of organizations are either organizations themselves or individual people. Members can bear specific organization member roles that are determined in the organization rules. The organization rules also determine how decisions are made on behalf of the organization by the organization members."

There is also an editor note, which indicates that we were very much aware of the shortfalls of this definition, and the controversy of it being placed under material entity or not. This is an OLD discussion, and the editors note has references to things that no longer exist (the OBI branches). So I am giving a slightly edited version here (1), and reproduce the original below (2), which can also be seen in any ontology browser.

(1) edited editor note: "The definition summarizes long discussions and leaves open if an organization is a material entity or a dependent continuant, as no consensus was reached on that. The current placement as a material entity is therefore temporary, in order to move forward with development. The definition is meant to capture that : 1) there are organization_member_roles (president, treasurer, branch editor), with individual persons as bearers 2) there are organization_roles (employer, owner, vendor, patent holder) 3) an organization has a charter / rules / bylaws, which specify what roles there are, how they should be realized, and how to modify the charter/rules/bylaws themselves. It is debatable what the organization itself is (some kind of dependent continuant or an aggregate of people). This also determines who/what the bearer of organization_roles' are. My personal favorite is still to define organization as a kind of 'legal entity', but thinking it through leads to all kinds of questions that are clearly outside the scope of OBI. Interestingly enough, it does not seem to matter much where we place organization itself, as long as we can subclass it (University, Corporation, Government Agency, Hospital), instantiate it (Affymetrix, NCBI, NIH, ISO, W3C, University of Oklahoma), and have it play roles. This leads to my proposal: We define organization through the statements 1 - 3 above, but without an 'is a' statement for now. We can leave it in its current place in the is_a hierarchy (material entity) or move it up to 'continuant'. We leave further clarifications to BFO, and close this issue for now."

I would like to suggest that anyone taking up a new definition of organization and placement in the hierarchy should inspect how that aligns with the current definition and use of organization, organization roles, and organization member roles. And I am not referring to just OBI here, but also all the ontologies that import it and use the term. There is clearly a lot of work that can be done to improve the current modeling, and it is completely possible that the current model needs fundamental changes. But given that we are talking about a working system, such changes should be clearly argued, and obviously beneficial for the ontology developers and users.

• Bjoern

(2) original note: "editor note: BP: The definition summarizes long email discussions on the OBI developer, roles, biomaterial and denrie branches. It leaves open if an organization is a material entity or a dependent continuant, as no consensus was reached on that. The current placement as material is therefore temporary, in order to move forward with development. Here is the entire email summary, on which the definition is based: 1) there are organization_member_roles (president, treasurer, branch editor), with individual persons as bearers 2) there are organization_roles (employer, owner, vendor, patent holder) 3) an organization has a charter / rules / bylaws, which specify what roles there are, how they should be realized, and how to modify the charter/rules/bylaws themselves. It is debatable what the organization itself is (some kind of dependent continuant or an aggregate of people). This also determines who/what the bearer of organization_roles' are. My personal favorite is still to define organization as a kind of 'legal entity', but thinking it through leads to all kinds of questions that are clearly outside the scope of OBI. Interestingly enough, it does not seem to matter much where we place organization itself, as long as we can subclass it (University, Corporation, Government Agency, Hospital), instantiate it (Affymetrix, NCBI, NIH, ISO, W3C, University of Oklahoma), and have it play roles. This leads to my proposal: We define organization through the statements 1 - 3 above, but without an 'is a' statement for now. We can leave it in its current place in the is_a hierarchy (material entity) or move it up to 'continuant'. We leave further clarifications to BFO, and close this issue for now."

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 6:05 PM Mike Conlon @.***> wrote:

Our requirements for organizations are very similar to those of Melissa above. See https://mconlon17.github.io/organization-ontology/en/master/domain-definition.html which could certainly be improved.

And yes, organizations can exist without people. They can be inherited in many jurisdictions. Organizations have assets (land, IP, cash) as well as people and declarations (legal or otherwise). And yes, perhaps they are a collection of all these things -- some material and some immaterial.

And agree about simplicity.

And agree about excitement. Representation of organizations is a good problem to be solved.

Curious about the research organization ontology. Why would this not be a subset of an organization ontology -- seems most (all?) of the issues are the same, research organizations focus on a particular set of activities and interests. We have tried to think about all organizations, of which research organizations are a subset.

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[StroemPhi]

As the one who opened this issue, I now propose to close it, as the comments provided here make it clear to me why understanding organisation as a material entity is most pragmatic at the moment. The only thing that might be helpful for others in the future is to link to this issue via an rdfs:seeAlso or iao:termtracker item annotation on obi:organization. I could make a PR for this in OBI, if you agree that htis would be helpful.