Core-Business-Vocabulary
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[Use case]: Representation of people as legal entities
Use case name
Representation of people as legal entities
Please insert the status of the use case
Under Development
Use case creator
Jakub Klímek
Stakeholders
EU citizens, EU businesses
Problem statement
What is a Legal Entity differs in individual EU countries, as the term is often based on national legislation. In some countries (e.g. Czechia), an individual human person can be registered in a business registry, assigned a registration number, tax ID, etc., and perform business activities. There seem to be two categories - sole traders (have legal responsibilities and properties similar to a regular business company) and self-employed people (they do not have an employer, they issue invoices for their services, but usually do not have employees themselves, etc.).
The Legal Entity definition says "A self-employed person, company, or organization that has legal rights and obligations.", indicating that a self-employed person could be considered an instance of legal:LegalEntity
.
Moreover, in the usage note, there is a statement "This makes Legal Entities distinct from the concept of organizations, groups or sole traders".
Is this correct? Shouldn't the definition rather include "sole traders" as those are the ones more similar to companies? They seem to fit Legal entities more than self-employed people.
Either way, there is another issue. legal:LegalEntity
is a subclassof http://www.w3.org/ns/org#FormalOrganization
, which in turn is subclassof http://www.w3.org/ns/org#organization
(there is a typo in the link in the document, it should be http://www.w3.org/ns/org#Organization
defined as "Represents a collection of people organized together into a community or other social, commercial or political structure." - this seems to exclude individuals, as individuals do not seem like collections of people, unless you count 1 as a collection. Therefore, this seems like an inconsistency.
Existing approaches
Existing approaches
Links
org:Organization legal:LegalEntity
Requirements
- Decide whether legal:LegalEntity really should be subclassof org:Organization, as it allows individuals, while org:Organization seems not to
- Define sole trader and decide whether they should be instances of legal:LegalEntity
- Define self-employed people and decide whether they should be instances of legal:LegalEntity
Related use cases
Related use cases
Comments
Comments