2015-09-08 Meeting notes
- Dennis Wisnosky
Date
Attendees
Decisions
There were many decisions made at this meeting. DN immediately embedded them into the protege.
Discussion items 
20150908 FIBO-BE FCT
JIRA Issues: BE71 property chain for isdomiciliedIn. Once we figure out how property chains are to be done across FIBO, we would then implement this isue. The intent was that we create the chain that would allow us to have some integrity between the country that an organization is organized in and the country that the entity is domiciled in.
MB notes that there are two concepts in play that can be labeled as resident or domiciled. One is being organized in a country or jurisdiction, which is what the BoE regards as Resident. The other, for e.g. humans, is being formally recognized as a resident of a country. The intent of this chaining is to link a jurisdiction to a country.
isOrganizedIn here relates to legal recognition of he legal person. It follows that the entity is by implication, domiciled in the country in which that jurisdiction has range e.g. United Kingdom for England and Wales, and the USA for a California jurisdiction. So these are a consequence. The intent is to hard wire this relationship so we can validate assertions. This will work as long as the instance data for jurisdictions include the property has Reach relating it to the country.
BE70: Introduces new concepts for government entities and introduces the notion of polity. Polity was the term ancestral to Sovereign, Municipality, Tribal Entity and so on it was the new common ancestor to these. Government Entity was incomplete without a link to a Polity. Sovereign is now sovereignState in this ontology still representing the legal person that is the sovereign i.e. the kind of polity. Polity is also defined as a kind of Formal Organization as well as a kind of juridicallPerson. This may be a source of confusion e.g. regionalState is also a child of this thing. Sovereign is an artificial legal person, which is what is meant by a Juridical Person. Juridical person is any artificial legal person, and in the present ontology, these are all also formal Organizations, which was not in the original simpler model. In the published OMG Foundations, we did not distinguish between geophysical and geopolitical. This was an over simplification.
Pete Rivett: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign
Pete raises the interesting questions of heads of state in exile (including king e.g. Yemen) and the issue of recognition. We need to be model the concepts that people might recognize, even if they don't all agree with one another about what they recognize.
MB recommends we distinguish Sovereign from sovereignState and the label as used here could be misleading. We would be better labeling this Sovereign. There is a definition of sovereignState which David believes corresponds to the meaning of Sovereign i.e. as a kind of Polity. Mike is not so convinced. Is the EU a Polity? Does the EU have sovereignty as such, over some geopolitical entity? It is possible to have either full or partial sovereignty over something. The definition "Dominion and authority over some sovereign state". Is this the case for the EU? It is not. As far as we know the EU does not (at present) have sovereignty over the member states - See wiki link there is a concept of pooled sovereignty. Also in that narrative it shows that supranational entity in the sense intended there is some grouping of nations, not some international agency. We may need to revise our definition for supranationalEntity. The above link identifies 4 aspects to sovereignty. As a simple minimum, we need to represent the concept of shared sovereignty, for example in a federation where the state has its own jurisdiction (as some sovereignty) as well as the federal nation itself.
The earlier drafts of FIBO set this deliberately simple so as not to have to go into these kinds of details, for example just saying the Sovereign was a legal person and leaving it at that. David now says that sovereignState, as a kind of Polity, is NOT the same as Sovereign. This is a problem because we need the notion of sovereign debt, and we need to define that which is the debtor of such debt. So if that isn't it, then it is still needed. Are these synonyms? David seems to suggest there is something else that is sovereign, however, MB thinks the only other concept is the figurehead, which we agree we do not need. MB still recommends we make this not a child of formal organization, since sovereign (and other kinds of Polity) as a very high level legal fiction, which differs in almost all its details from one Polity to another and is unlikely to always perhaps ever be the result of two or more persons organizing themselves into an organization. So recommend we remove formalOrganization from being a parent of this.
Experiment: We try removing formalOrganization as a parent. It looks OK and nothing breaks.
Are we distinguishing government from Parliament? Government as a word has 2 meanings. There is the governing group or coalition within the legislature, as part of the parliament; then there is the overall sense of Government which has the 3 arms of legislature, executive and judiciary. Remove the word political from the definition of nationalGovernment, as otherwise it seems to point to the first concept. Government is defined as a kind of system, but the definition is still intended to be that of some independent thing, i.e. the set of organizations set up to carry out the functions of government, not the other, relative sense of what which governs. Federal Government is a government of a country where that county is itself a federal country (federation) and not a unitary state.
We need some kind of difference between federal state and regional entity such as country subdivision. Federal State could inherit from country Subdivision. Yes. All agree.
Federal state is a Country Subdivision with additional properties. Country Subdivision is in LCC. We would expect Foundations to import LCC in order to be able to then make federalState a child of countrySubdivision. The JIRA issue should also state that the import into Foundations from LCC needs to be added. RegionalState what does that even mean? Also federalCapital Area needs to be a kind of Country Subdivision, as part of the above new JIRA. We don’t need the 1st part of the restriction on Federal government saying that it governs some country since it inherits that already.
David adds FederalCapitalArea into the restriction for what a federation governs (not sure which JIRA covers this) Regional government should be disjoint with national government. That change is made in this ontology today. Not sure which JIRA covers that change. Government has the subtypes now as agreed, but we also need to consider the 3 branches of government which are not there now.
GovernmentInstrumentailty is some instrument of government but is not government in and of itself. The things like Government and even Government Department, are shown as children of Government, but this should really be an aggregation type of relationship not a subsumtion. All agree. These should all be children of governmentalEntity and not of Government. All agree. Then need a set of relationships between government and its core departments, branches and agencies. Government Department is equivalent to a Ministry, and exists as a distinct concept in different jurisdictions under whatever name. An agency is more like a standalone thing that is distinct fro