An organization is a continuant entity which can play roles, has members, and has a set of organization rules. Members of organizations are either organizations themselves or individual people. Members can bear specific organization member roles that are determined in the organization rules. The organization rules also determine how decisions are made on behalf of the organization by the organization members.
Raw data
obo_purl:IAO_0000111
organization
obo_purl:IAO_0000117
PERSON: Bjoern Peters
PERSON: Alan Ruttenberg
James Malone
PERSON: Philippe Rocca-Serra
Tomasz Adamusiak
PERSON: Susanna Sansone
Jie Zheng
oboinowl_gen:hasDbXref
NCIt:C92453
SNOMEDCT:21139007
MO:177
obo_purl:IAO_0000116
BP: The definition summarizes long email discussions on the OBI developer, roles, biomaterial and denrie branches. It leaves open if an organization is a material entity or a dependent continuant, as no consensus was reached on that. The current placement as material is therefore temporary, in order to move forward with development. Here is the entire email summary, on which the definition is based:
1) there are organization_member_roles (president, treasurer, branch
editor), with individual persons as bearers
2) there are organization_roles (employer, owner, vendor, patent holder)
3) an organization has a charter / rules / bylaws, which specify what roles
there are, how they should be realized, and how to modify the
charter/rules/bylaws themselves.
It is debatable what the organization itself is (some kind of dependent
continuant or an aggregate of people). This also determines who/what the
bearer of organization_roles' are. My personal favorite is still to define
organization as a kind of 'legal entity', but thinking it through leads to
all kinds of questions that are clearly outside the scope of OBI.
Interestingly enough, it does not seem to matter much where we place
organization itself, as long as we can subclass it (University, Corporation,
Government Agency, Hospital), instantiate it (Affymetrix, NCBI, NIH, ISO,
W3C, University of Oklahoma), and have it play roles.
This leads to my proposal: We define organization through the statements 1 -
3 above, but without an 'is a' statement for now. We can leave it in its
current place in the is_a hierarchy (material entity) or move it up to
'continuant'. We leave further clarifications to BFO, and close this issue
for now.
obo_purl:IAO_0000115
An organization is a continuant entity which can play roles, has members, and has a set of organization rules. Members of organizations are either organizations themselves or individual people. Members can bear specific organization member roles that are determined in the organization rules. The organization rules also determine how decisions are made on behalf of the organization by the organization members.
An entity that can bear roles, has members, and has a set of organization rules. Members of organizations are either organizations themselves or individual people. Members can bear specific organization member roles that are determined in the organization rules. The organization rules also determine how decisions are made on behalf of the organization by the organization members.
oboinowl_gen:hasExactSynonym
organisation
obo_purl:IAO_0000119
GROUP: OBI
obo_purl:IAO_0000112
PMID: 16353909.AAPS J. 2005 Sep 22;7(2):E274-80. Review. The joint food and agriculture organization of the United Nations/World Health Organization Expert Committee on Food Additives and its role in the evaluation of the safety of veterinary drug residues in foods.
