alanruttenberg
commented
7 years ago Thank you for your offer of a definition.
I'm not sure that I would classify an email address as a textual entity, but part of that is that I don't think textual entity is defined clearly enough, and in such a way as to not lead to the need for asserted multiple inheritance. So the first question I would ask is whether further specifying that it is a textual entity, or leaving it as it is, a sibling which is not declared disjoint, would have consequence for your application.
I'm also not sure that the specification of what it might be used for should be part of the definition, as the definition should cover all instances.
Another candidate for parent would be CRID, with an understanding that email addresses are about (at least) something like foaf:mbox. An argument against it being a CRID might be that while certain email addresses are centrally registers, not all are, for example gmail email addresses modified by adding "+xxxx" to the username part, every case of which is interpreted, for the purposes of email delivery, to be addressed to the same thing the email address without the "+xxx".
To capture the use of email address as authentication, see d-acts authentication. A plausible strategy would be to define a subclass of authentication which is authentication using an email address. You might engage the developers on the question of whether it needs to be the case that only documents(or rather their bearers) can have a credential role, as it would generally be agreed that an email address is a document.
There are a great many things that could use better definitions in IAO, and there are efforts towards a revision that might address them, but it is not here now. As a practical matter, does something in an application you have in mind hinge on better specifying email address?
Public-Health-Bioinformatics
mcourtot
jamesaoverton
Could that be finalized? Looking at the original thread, with Allan Ruttenberg's proposal: https://code.google.com/archive/p/information-artifact-ontology/issues/130 I throw this on the table: "An email address is a textual entity which is a local or internet network-resolvable identifier used for sending messages to a personal or organizational email account or message handler on an email server. It may also be used appropriately or illegitimately as an identification token in authentication or messaging processes."