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edmcouncil / fibo

The Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) defines the sets of things that are of interest in financial business applications and the ways that those things can relate to one another. In this way, FIBO can give meaning to any data (e.g., spreadsheets, relational databases, XML documents) that describe the business of finance.
https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo/
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FND-380a - Revise / replace several ontologies with their counterparts from the Commons Ontology Library v1.1 #1995

Closed ElisaKendall closed 5 months ago

ElisaKendall commented 5 months ago

Description

  1. Replace / deprecate elements in FIBO with their equivalents from the Commons 1.1 Roles and Compositions ontology
  2. Replace / deprecate elements in FIBO with their equivalents from the Commons 1.1 Parties and Situations ontology
  3. Replace uses of hasIdentity in Relations with its equivalent in the Commons 1.1 Roles and Compositions ontology

Fixes: #1994 / FND-380

Checklist:

ElisaKendall commented 5 months ago

An Organization should not be a subclass of/treated as a collection. That's why I'm concerned with the PR proposing to use hasMember/isMemberOf, from Collections which in Commons has the note:

            skos:noteNote that the domain of hasMember should be some sort of collection, aggregate, or group. In the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), hasMember is used in the case of parties (people and organizations), whereas comprises can have anything in its range.</skos:note>

Here the English language is working against us: despite both using "member", membership of an organization is quite different semantically from membership of a collection. Bottom line, I feel it's wrong to use Collections for organizations.

The use of this property has been in the ontology for years - we revised it to use the property from Commons last year, replacing the one from Relations, but the use of that specific property has been in the ontology for a long time. Fixing it, if we decide to do so, should be done in the context of a new issue, not in this one.

jfgemski commented 5 months ago

I agree with Pete.

ElisaKendall commented 5 months ago

I agree with Pete.

This doesn't make sense to me - after further review, the definition of hasMember is "includes, as a discrete element" which is true of the members of any team, including an organization. The note that says "Note that the domain of hasMember should be some sort of collection, aggregate, or group." includes a second sentence, which is "In the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), hasMember is used in the case of parties (people and organizations), whereas comprises can have anything in its range." This is precisely the case with respect to the use of hasMember on the Organization class. An organization is an aggregate. It is not a collection in the sense of a set, but it does have people that are part of the organization.

The change impacts not only the Organization class, but all of its subclasses as well as other classes that include related concepts. Rather than doing this, I would prefer to raise an issue in Commons to remove the note about the domain. Use of this property was not part of the pull request - the change to the organization class was to change the now deprecated IndependentParty from FIBO to Party from Commons. This change would impact roughly 20 odd ontologies in FIBO plus reference data. Every place we use isMemberOf or hasMember has to be reviewed individually and others would need revision as well. That includes more than 3000 individuals, only some of which should be changed, if we agree to make this change, based on a cursory review.

I think this should be discussed in a separate issue, and we should include Davide, who can help explain why or why not the approach taken in the Organizations ontology in FIBO is correct with respect to its definition in Commons before we make a wholesale change in the semantics like this.

jfgemski commented 5 months ago

Changed my mind after reading the definition we have plus the dictionary definition. Pete is correct that the meaning is different in the business world. The problem I have is what is a business organization a collection of? Is it a collection of employees, a collection of shareholders, etc.? Let's discuss at our next meeting.

tahoeblue commented 5 months ago

I also agree (with Pete and John). A single organization is a single thing (with a single persona). It would have a single LEI, for example. One can talk about the internal structures of an organization as a set of business units, or people, or locations, etc, but the organization itself is not a collection of similar things in a set or list — it is a unique thing.

-Jeff

On Jan 24, 2024, at 5:09 PM, John Gemski @.***> wrote:

Changed my mind after reading the definition we have plus the dictionary definition. Pete is correct that the meaning is different in the business world. The problem I have is what is a business organization a collection of? Is it a collection of employees, a collection of shareholders, etc.? Let's discuss at our next meeting.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/edmcouncil/fibo/pull/1995#issuecomment-1909181183, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB72TFTBB2FNK577FDUZHFLYQGWELAVCNFSM6AAAAABCCME7D2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMBZGE4DCMJYGM. You are receiving this because your review was requested.

ElisaKendall commented 5 months ago

I also agree (with Pete and John). A single organization is a single thing (with a single persona). It would have a single LEI, for example. One can talk about the internal structures of an organization as a set of business units, or people, or locations, etc, but the organization itself is not a collection of similar things in a set or list — it is a unique thing. … -Jeff On Jan 24, 2024, at 5:09 PM, John Gemski @.***> wrote: Changed my mind after reading the definition we have plus the dictionary definition. Pete is correct that the meaning is different in the business world. The problem I have is what is a business organization a collection of? Is it a collection of employees, a collection of shareholders, etc.? Let's discuss at our next meeting. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1995 (comment)>, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB72TFTBB2FNK577FDUZHFLYQGWELAVCNFSM6AAAAABCCME7D2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMBZGE4DCMJYGM. You are receiving this because your review was requested.

@tahoeblue In the ontology, Organization is a subclass of party and is not defined as a collection. This discussion is about the choice of property on the restriction, hasMember, which has a note on it that says the thing in the domain should be an aggregate or collection. That property does NOT require the class in the domain to be a subclass of Collection, but suggests that the thing in the domain is some sort of aggregate (which may not be a collection) or a collection. But let's discuss in our next meeting. I disagree with Pete that there is an absolute requirement that the domain of the property MUST be a subclass of Collection - the ontology does not make that semantic commitment, which is really the crux of the issue.

And - if we make any change in this regard, it should be done in a separate issue due to the extend of the change.

tahoeblue commented 5 months ago

I see. Thanks, Elisa. Where is Emily Latella when I need her ?

On Jan 25, 2024, at 8:43 AM, Elisa Kendall @.***> wrote:

I also agree (with Pete and John). A single organization is a single thing (with a single persona). It would have a single LEI, for example. One can talk about the internal structures of an organization as a set of business units, or people, or locations, etc, but the organization itself is not a collection of similar things in a set or list — it is a unique thing. … <x-msg://31/#> -Jeff On Jan 24, 2024, at 5:09 PM, John Gemski @.***> wrote: Changed my mind after reading the definition we have plus the dictionary definition. Pete is correct that the meaning is different in the business world. The problem I have is what is a business organization a collection of? Is it a collection of employees, a collection of shareholders, etc.? Let's discuss at our next meeting. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1995 (comment) https://github.com/edmcouncil/fibo/pull/1995#issuecomment-1909181183>, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB72TFTBB2FNK577FDUZHFLYQGWELAVCNFSM6AAAAABCCME7D2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMBZGE4DCMJYGM https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB72TFTBB2FNK577FDUZHFLYQGWELAVCNFSM6AAAAABCCME7D2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMBZGE4DCMJYGM. You are receiving this because your review was requested.

@tahoeblue https://github.com/tahoeblue In the ontology, Organization is a subclass of party and is not defined as a collection. This discussion is about the choice of property on the restriction, hasMember, which has a note on it that says the thing in the domain should be an aggregate or collection. That property does NOT require the class in the domain to be a subclass of Collection, but suggests that the thing in the domain is some sort of aggregate (which may not be a collection) or a collection. But let's discuss in our next meeting. I disagree with Pete that there is an absolute requirement that the domain of the property MUST be a subclass of Collection - the ontology does not make that semantic commitment, which is really the crux of the issue.

And - if we make any change in this regard, it should be done in a separate issue due to the extend of the change.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/edmcouncil/fibo/pull/1995#issuecomment-1910586793, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB72TFSASFJAVW5KGPFDGELYQKDU5AVCNFSM6AAAAABCCME7D2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMJQGU4DMNZZGM. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.