Organization ontology

Much information, both public sector and within enterprises, relates to organizations and organizational units. Yet there didn't seem to be a satisfactory common vocabulary for presenting such information in linked data. At the request of The National Archive we solved this by developing an organization ontology.

In any such undertaking we first have to be clear on the requirements. Our look at this identified that what was needed was a very lightweight, highly reusable ontology which did not try to model particular organizational structures. We also wanted to make sure the ontology connected to and reused other commonly used linked data vocabularies such as foaf. Since a survey failed to turn up any fully satisfactory candidates we developed a new ontology (draft and iterate), based on the lessons from the survey and community feedback.

The end result gives a simple core which is able to represent organizations, organizational units and people's roles within organizations while being very extensible. It is openly usable and has been exploited by a number of groups including data.gov.uk who have been able to extend the ontology to cope with the rich mysteries of the UK government structures and are using it to publish organogram information for all government departments.

We've been very grateful to W3C and Tim Berners-Lee for hosting the ontology itself. While the ontology is not itself a formal standard, having stable and neutral URLs for such broadly valuable resources is very important.