Add ethnicity or culture identification to individuals

[tswicegood]

When representing people, we at @TexasTribune often want to attach an ethnicity to that Person. The current spec does not offer a way to do that.

It is worth noting that this could possibly be done via the HAL-style links that we have chatted about. Rather than adding to the spec, it might be best to allow for race to be a link. The implementation in JSON might look something like this:

{
  "_links": {
    "ethnicity": {
      "href": "http://example.com/api/ethnicity/{{ ethnicity ID }}",
      "rel": "http://example.com/rels/ethnicity/"
    }
  }
}

Going the HAL-style for this external links provides a documented way to specify ethnicity, without clouding the spec.

Edited: Remove /race/ from the example URIs.

[tswicegood]

Opening this as a new issue to get some feedback. I'm really curious as to how to implement this and so far either adding a new field or a HAL-style link are the only two options I've come up with.

[jpmckinney]

It should be no problem for you to add an ethnicity property to your Person objects. Popolo encourages you to use your own terms if they're not covered by the terms in Popolo. I'll keep this issue open though to see if there's sufficient interest in adding it to the spec. You may want to post a message to the list to see if there's support: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-opengov/

Many national censuses use controlled vocabularies for the possible values of ethnicity, so it may be worthwhile to reference some of those lists if we add this property.

[jpmckinney]

I've collected enough evidence to add this to the spec. NIEM, OASIS CIQ, and OpenSocial have an ethnicity property. No simple RDF term that I can find.

@tswicegood Can you explain a use case for why you would want to track ethnicity? I will need that to add it to the spec.

[tmtmtmtm]

I don't know what @tswicegood had in mind, but in the House of Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, laws can only be passed if approved by a majority of the representatives of each ethnicity. This can't be inferred from the Party, as, for example, Hasan Bećirović and Krunoslav Vrdoljak are both SDP representatives, but one is a Bosniak and the other a Croat.

[girogiro]

What about 'nationality'? Nationality is much more used in Europe than ethnicity. It's more about country of birth than racial issues.

See the difference: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100108095324AAe82oM

[jpmckinney]

My understanding is that most (if not all) members of the House of Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina are citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and so their nationality will be "Bosnia and Herzegovina". We need an ethnicity field to distinguish between the ethnic groups that compose that chamber: 5 Bosniaks, 5 Serbs, and 5 Croats. It's in their constitution.

[jpmckinney]

We can open a separate issue re: nationality if there is a use case for it.

[jpmckinney]

Draft spec is updated for comment http://popoloproject.com/specs/person.html

[tswicegood]

Food for thought, can this be done via some sort of use of Organization or a structure like that. Possibly a Group in order to keep it generic and remove all of the organizational cruft. They're very similar, in that they're shared and you might want to track information about the group/ethnicity/nationality as a whole, but they may not have a founding date, dissolution date, and so forth.

That discussion aside, there is a possibility for multiple ethnicities. It's common in the US for people to claim various combinations of ethnicities since they have a connection to each through their family. Should the spec be adjusted to allow a string or array?

[jpmckinney]

I'm beginning to think that most properties should be allowed to be multiple (especially if you start tracking historical data for each field). In RDF, single versus multiple is all the same. In JSON, it's more work - which is why we didn't tackle this issue from the start. See the new #47

Re: multiple ethnicities, I thought the US census had a single-choice question for ethnicity, not multiple choice? Most census bureaus that I know of do not allow for multiple answers to that question (they make you write it in if you don't fit into their categories). I know that, at a personal level, people may identify with multiple ethnicities, but that's a different use case than in most legislative contexts where the list of possible answers is more constrained.

For an ethnicity to be a class, you need more than one property. What other properties would you want to add to the ethnicity object? I would not consider a person to be a "member" of an ethnicity - we would not use the membership model for that. It would be a direct relation between the person and the ethnicity, as it is now.

[girogiro]

Well, after reading Wikipedia page on Nationality I learned that the terms nationality and ethnicity are understood quite differently in various countries. Here in Slovakia we would say that all members of Bosnia and Herzegovina parliament have B&H citizenship but three different nationalities: Bosniak, Croat or Serb.

Ethnic group refers to a something less than a nation here. A group of people sharing culture, customs and history, but without a codified language (e.g. Gypsies).

In Slovak republic lives minorities of various nations and ethnic groups (9% Hungarian, 5% Gypsy, etc.) besides 80% of Slovaks. We understand that all of them have Slovak citizenship but different nationality (národnosť), based on their free decision in the census and with no legal relationship to the related country.

After reading the Wikipedia article, I see now that a wrong translation "nationality" is used for "national identity" here. In the light of that, the suggested term "ethnicity" may be a good choice for the intended usage.

[girogiro]

I noticed, that

ethnicity The three ethnic groups of the House of Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina must agree on a law for it to pass.

description is used in the specification draft, but

 "ethnicity": "white",

is in the example below. That supports the confusion about the "ethnicity" meaning. It would be fine to explicitly state that the property is intended for all of the following:

• less or more specific race or ethnic group (e.g. black, asian, white, Black Caribbean, White European, Caucasian, etc.)
• national identity (Scottish, Slovak, Serb, etc.)

[girogiro]

The only problem will be if your use-case needs to precisely represent that a person is of mestizo ethnicity, Mexican national identity and US nationality. (And possibly even holding Swiss citizenship.)

Solution: to allow multiple ethnicity values?

[jpmckinney]

Re: multiple values, I'd like to consider that in #47, as this is not the only field that may need multiple values.

It may be simplest to add a national_identity field in addition to ethnicity. @tswicegood I'll need a use case for ethnicity.

Since we have a use case for national identity, I'll just put national_identity in, and take ethnicity out until we have a use case.

I chose "national identity", because "nationality" in English can be confused with ethnicity and citizenship, which is not what we're trying to model here.

[jpmckinney]

Thanks @girogiro for researching and pointing out these issues!

[jpmckinney]

Re: national identity, I've opened and closed #48

[jpmckinney]

I need a use case, and either two supporters or a compelling use case to add a property to the spec. As there hasn't been any recent activity, I'll close this until those conditions are met.

[kaerumy]

Chipping in here, that while people want to move away from race here in Malaysia, it's still a valid field in multiracial Malaysia. It would also be useful for us to also be able to extract diversity statistics.

Our use cases:

• For statistics to see if there is diversity in our parliament or other organizations
• We have constitutional ethic/race requirements eg. Chief Minister of some states have to be Malay
• There legal race definitions and policies, where it is important that organizations have minimum number representation by race.

So this a vote for yes, for an ethnicity field.

[jpmckinney]

Thanks, @kaerumy I've reopened the issue.