The Organization Ontology

The Organization Ontology (ORG) is an ontology for representing organizations of all kinds.

The Organization Ontology uses Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper level ontology, and conforms to Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Principles for constructing interoperable ontologies.

The Organization Ontology is a one of several ontologies developed for the representation of scholarship by the VIVO Project. The Organization Ontology is not limited to the representation of scholarship – it can be used to represent organizations in any setting.

In VIVO 1, organizational representation was part of the VIVO ontology. In the new VIVO ontology, organizational representation has been removed in favor of this new Organizational Ontology. The Organizational Ontology is independent of VIVO and can be used in any setting where information about organizations needs to be represented.

An organization is a group of people with a purpose. It is not merely a group of people – that would be a collection of people, not an organization. The purpose may be explicit or implicit. Organizations may be legally constituted or informal. Organizations may be parts of other organizations.

See Organizations for subsumption and subtypes.

The Organization Ontology is designed to insure it can represent Research Organization Registry data. ROR is a curated, CC0 collection of facts regarding over 97,000 research organizations in the world. The Organization Ontology can represent these facts for use in graph-based systems such as VIVO.

See the domain definition for an extended defintion with competency questions, and consequences.

Tools are provided with the Organization Ontology for retrieving ROR data and creating individuals with assertions as RDF triples using the Organization Ontology.

Contents

• Organization Ontology Domain Definition
• Organizations
• Identifiers
• Addresses
• Facilities
• Locations
• Dates and Times
• Associations
• Annotation properties
• Classes
• Object Properties
• Datatype Properties
• Named Individuals
• Out of Scope Terms
• Translating from VIVO to the Organization Ontology
• Translating from ROR to the Organization Ontology
• Translating from schema.org to the Organization Ontology
• Dates Data
• For Ontology Authors
• For Documentation Authors
• Notes and Sources
• Glossary

List of Tables

• Table 1 Types of Organizations

• Table 2 Dispositions

• Table 3 Qualities

• Table 4 Identifiers

• Table 5 Classes

• Table 6 Annotation Properties

• Table 7 Object Properties

• Table 8 Datatype Properties

• Table 9 Named Individuals

• Table 10 VIVO 1 Cross Reference

• Table 11 Terms used to represent addresses

• Table 12 Common Annotation Properties

• Table 13 Curation Status

• Table 14 Terms used to represent dates and times

• Table 15 Terms used to represent locations

• Table 16 Common Object Properties

• Table 17 Translating VIVO types to Organizational Ontology assertions

• Table 18 Translating ROR types to VIVO Organizational assertions

• Table 19 Translating schema.org types to VIVO Organizational assertions

List of Figures

• Figure 1 Representation of organizations

• Figure 2 Types of Organizations

• Figure 3 Representation of dates and times

• Figure 4 Representation of memberships

• Figure 5 Representation of employment

• Index