Unable to specify or represent an organisation part/department since ePO 4.0-rc.2

[schivmeister]

Issue

The property epo:hasOrganisationUnit that was present in ePO 3.1.0 for mapping an organisation part name changed in 4.0-rc.1 to epo:hasOrganisationUnitName, and then in 4.0-rc.2, it was apparently removed, as evidenced by the changelogs:

- :hasOrganisationUnitName a owl:DatatypeProperty ;
-    rdfs:isDefinedBy :core ;
-    skos:definition """The name of a subpart of an organisation.
- Additional Information:
- E.g. the relevant department of a large organisation.
- We added this attribute in case of eProcurement notices where the Buyer is actually a part of an Organization and the rest of the properties apply to the rest of the Organisation as well. (org:Organization) """@en ;
-     skos:prefLabel "Has organisation unit name"@en .

However, the reason for this removal is not made clear in the commits or the logs.

This is required to map for e.g. the field BT-16-Organization-TouchPoint or BT-16-Organization-Company in the eForms SDK, which can identify a department in an organisation contact point or company address, with one of the following typical XML structures:

Organisation Contact Point Address

<Organization>
  <TouchPoint>
    <PostalAddress>
      <Department>

Company Address

<Company>
  <PostalAddress>
    <Department>

Since 4.0.0 ePO has introduced the notion of a sub-organisation with the org:subOrganizationOf relationship (object property).

If this was meant as a replacement, then it is not a very appropriate one to represent the semantics, i.e. that of only a line in the address specifying the department. We would not typically think of a department as a sub-organisation; it would not have the same basic characteristics of an organisation to qualify as a valid subsumption.

[andreea-pasare]

The decision to remove the attribute epo:hasOrganisationUnitName and add org:subOrganizationOf was done in order to align with Core organization ontology where the org:subOrganizationOf is defined as:

This modification is mentioned in the Change notes related to the release notes of ePO 4.0.0 that can be found here.

As a note, a similar modelling approach is adopted in the latest release of Core Business Vocabulary:

[schivmeister]

@andreea-pasare thanks for the context, that's very useful to know. Unless I missed it again, the change notes you linked to does not have any information about this implied replacement -- only that at some point in the history one was added and the other removed. But it could also be a lack of intuition on my part.

I understand now that it was a conscious decision, and that at a fundamental level the department is a specialization of the organization. However, a sub-organization is very broad, and typically refers to things like subsidiaries. We see these notions discussed here, for example:

The subOrganization and subOrganizationOf properties express the relationships between organizations in a hierarchical structure. In contrast, hasUnit and unitOf are used to link to operational departments within an organization that may not generally exist in their own right.

So it appears a further specialization will be helpful to have. I see such a specialization in the Organization Ontology and perhaps the Core Business Vocabulary can follow suit:

org:hasUnit a owl:ObjectProperty, rdf:Property;

    rdfs:label "has Unit"@en;
...
    rdfs:domain org:FormalOrganization;
    rdfs:range  org:OrganizationalUnit;
    rdfs:subPropertyOf org:hasSubOrganization;

    rdfs:comment """Indicates a unit which is part of this Organization, e.g. a Department within a larger FormalOrganization. Inverse of `org:unitOf`."""@en;
...