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.

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/OBI_0000245

PERSON: Alan Ruttenberg

PERSON: Susanna Sansone

PERSON: Philippe Rocca-Serra

PERSON: Bjoern Peters

GROUP: OBI

organization

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.

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.

organization

OBI:0000245

organization

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.

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/BFO_0000040