Proposal: namespaces/external entity definitions.

Foreword

Basic FTM ontology is nice (despite carrying some legacy fields) but not always does it fit the task. Great success

In the case you want to extend the basic ontology you have following options:

Rewrite it from scratch according to your needs
Alter key entities by adding new fields, maybe with prefix
Create your own descendants to existing ontology to give your version some regional or task-specific flavor.

First two methods doesn't really fit some tasks, as long as you probably want to have the backward compatibility to reuse the data that aleph, opensanctions and other sources provide you for free.

Problem

In case when you are extending the ontology you have to have the way to distinguish original entities from the one you've added. For example, to be able to export in the original format by finding each parent that came from original ontology. Also you need a clear cue to show what was added to it.

Proposed solution

This can be solved with a new base field, for example, a namespace, where all the original entity types will have namespace=base or something. In this case the developer will be able not only to extend the original ontology but also to re-use ontologies published by others (again, with regional/task-specific flavor, maybe committed to contrib part of this repo).

@pudo also proposed to extend this and allow to specify the public url of the entity type. In this case Aleph will be able to deal with the data that was mapped to an extended ontology, loading/caching/maintaining the list of external definitions, as long as they are derived from unaltered original ontology.

alephdata / followthemoney