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tdwg
Class:OrganisationalUnit
| Parent | ObjectGroup |
| Label | Organisational Unit |
| Definition | A unit within an organisational hierarchy which may be at, above or below the institutional level. |
| Usage | |
| Required | No |
| Repeatable | Yes |
| Relationships | Range: ObjectGroup, OrganisationalUnit, RecordLevel | Class-level properties: Address, ContactDetail, Identifier, MeasurementOrFact, OrganisationalUnit, PersonRole, Reference, TemporalCoverage |
| Potential standards/vocabularies/ontologies to adopt | AIISO (http://vocab.org/aiiso/) ; FOAF (http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/); W3C (https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-vocab-org-20140116/) |
| Notes | This class can represent any level of organisational unit, incorporating institutions (e.g. a museum), higher units (e.g. a university to which a museum belongs) and more detailed structures (e.g the departments and divisions within a museum). It can be used to arrange these different units at different levels into a hierarchical structure. This class combines aspects of both class org:Organization (https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-vocab-org-20140116/#org:Organization) and class org:OrganizationalUnit (https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-vocab-org-20140116/#org:OrganizationalUnit) from the W3C Organization Ontology ORG (https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-vocab-org-20140116/#overview-of-ontology). Recommended best practice is to associate a unique, persistent organisational identifier (PID) with each created organisational unit. This will allow an unambiguous and continual identification of the unit, as well as the creation of organisational hierarchies. Existing providers of PIDs for organisations are, e.g. https://grid.ac/ and https://ror.org/. The provision of organisational PIDs might be extended to intra-organisational units in the future. Properties of Class: Identifier can be used to add identifier information for organisational units. |
I think this is really out of scope of a collection description standard. It should only point to entities responsible for a collection and/or owning a collection, but I cannot think of any use case why for describing a collection it is necessary to describe how an organisation is hierarchical organised. At least it has not any scientific value. Even for asset management I do not really see the added value.
If anything, shouldn't OrganisationalUnit not have Institution as Parent instead of CollectionDescription?
This is meant to allow the documentation of organisational units responsible for the management of a collection within the institution. For example: at FM we would have separate OrganisationalUnits for Geology, Birds, Herps, Fishes, Botany etc. Without this we would only have a single record for the whole museum.
Original Definition: An organisational unit within an institutional hierarchy
New Definition: This class provides an oppertunity to indicate where in the institutional hierarchy the collection description belongs and which unit within that institution who is responsible for its management.
e.g. The Field Museum of Natural History->Zoology Collection->Insect Division
Would using the generic foaf:Organisation class work? Seems to be flexible enough to cover a legal 'organization' as well as subunits like department/division (the range of which presumably would be defined by OrganisationalUnitType + a controlled vocab).
There's a few existing extensions to the foaf term in the org ontology as well, which could poss be useful in the future if we want to be able to describe pan-institution collections.
Is there a reason why the class is "OrganisationalUnit" and not "Organization"? See https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-vocab-org-20140116/#overview-of-ontology .
See the description for "Organization": "Represents a collection of people organized together into a community or other social, commercial or political structure. The group has some common purpose or reason for existence which goes beyond the set of people belonging to it and can act as an Agent. Organizations are often decomposable into hierarchical structures. "
versus for "OrganizationalUnit": "An Organization such as a department or support unit which is part of some larger Organization and only has full recognition within the context of that Organization. In particular the unit would not be regarded as a legal entity in its own right. "
My suggestion is for the Class to be "Organization" and "organizationalUnit" to be moved and added as a new property.
