[Buildingdata] Representing a person's role

[Christopher Gutteridge]

I've been thinking lots about how often I need to talk about people 
based on their role, not as a person.

Some systems I've seen model job roles as a group where zero or more 
people belong, but I'm more interested in roles which are an explicit 
relationship between a person and an organisation.

The driver for this is normally in a programme of events we list a 
person as the speaker in a session, then associate them with their 
affiliations.
http://data.dev8d.org/2012/programme/?person=AlexanderDutton&output=rdf

This is a bit ugly, and I want to re-think it. I currently feel that 
what would make more sense is that if you want someone's affiliation to 
be considered relevant to a talk, then they, the foaf:Person, are not 
the speaker, but rather them as a x:PersonRole which is a named 
relationship between a person and another thing. Generally an 
organization, but it could also be an event (eg a conference...)

It would be generalisation of work Nick Gibbins, Marcus Cobden, Alastair 
Cummings, and Colin Williams did for ECS many years back;  
http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/docs/

PersonRole would be a subclass of foaf:Agent so it can be a speaker at 
event, member of a group etc. Many but not all properties of a 
PersonRole can be considered also properties of the Person who holds 
that role, (eg phone number, group membership, hat size) but a few 
properties may explicitly describe a PersonRole, not a person.

A PersonRole being a role of an organisation does not imply the person 
is a member of that organisation-- some roles could be 'advisor' or 
'guest'.

It's very possible there's an existing scheme that does this, but I've 
not run across it.

Any idea where it should live if we coin it ourselves? openorg 
namespace, I guess.

-- Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248 You 
should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/