[Buildingdata] Re: Representing a person's role

[Alexander Dutton]

Hi Chris,

Epimorphics' organisation ontology covers this; does that work? Here, an
org:Role is a skos:Concept for things like "developer", and
org:Membership is the relation between a person, an organisation and
their role. However, a membership ain't quite "agent acting in capacity
of", so I'm not sure it would work in place of PersonRole. Subclass
org:Membership to add that interpretation, or is that still conflating
stuff?

- Alex

On 04/03/12 13:01, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
> 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/
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