GMEOW Organization Module

• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/organization
• Tier: core
• Group: core

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 67 terms and contributes 132 mapping or projection rows. Use it when its terms match the native fact you want to preserve; use the linkage tables to see how those facts leave GMEOW for consumer vocabularies.

Dependencies

• gmeow:slices/entities
• gmeow:slices/events
• gmeow:slices/kernel
• gmeow:slices/places

Consumers

• Employers, publishers, registrars across slices; posts and roles; the W3C-ORG projection.

Local Map

Examples

Post And Membership

• Source: slices/core/organization/examples/post-and-membership.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:Membership, gmeow:Organization, gmeow:Person, gmeow:Post, gmeow:fillsPost, gmeow:membershipMember, gmeow:membershipOrganization, gmeow:name, gmeow:organizationType, gmeow:organizationTypeCompany

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: the seat is not the sitter. GMEOW de-conflates the two
# things surface vocabularies collapse into "CFO": the gmeow:Post (the seat, a
# RoleMixin that exists whether or not anyone fills it) and the gmeow:Membership
# (a person's tenure occupying it). The membership gmeow:fillsPost the post, so a
# vacancy (a Post with no Membership) and a succession (two Memberships filling
# one Post) are both expressible. organizationType is an open VALUE (a company is
# a company by value, not by subclass), and subOrganizationOf decomposes the org
# structurally — distinct from "is a member of".
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/organization/> .
@prefix rdfs:  <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .

# --- The company and a structural sub-organization.
ex:acme a gmeow:Organization ;
    gmeow:name "Acme Robotics Inc."@en ;
    gmeow:organizationType gmeow:organizationTypeCompany .

ex:engineering a gmeow:Organization ;
    gmeow:name "Engineering Division"@en ;
    gmeow:organizationType gmeow:organizationTypeCompany ;
    gmeow:subOrganizationOf ex:acme .

# --- The CFO Post: the seat, defined independently of who holds it.
ex:cfoPost a gmeow:Post ;
    rdfs:label "Chief Financial Officer"@en ;
    gmeow:postIn ex:acme .

# --- The person, and the Membership that fills the seat — the sitter, distinct
#     from the chair. A later tenure would be ANOTHER Membership filling the same
#     Post; a vacancy would leave the Post with no Membership at all.
ex:dana a gmeow:Person ;
    gmeow:name "Dana Reyes"@en .

ex:danaTenure a gmeow:Membership ;
    gmeow:membershipMember ex:dana ;
    gmeow:membershipOrganization ex:acme ;
    gmeow:fillsPost ex:cfoPost .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Individuals

Linkages

• Rows: 132
• Projection profiles: foaf, org, resume, schema-org, vcard
• External vocabularies: esco, foaf, org, rdf, schema, vcard, wd

Guide

Organization — modelling & interoperability guide

GMEOW's organization slice is a W3C Organization Ontology (ORG) superset that reuses the universal event, lifecycle, temporal, place, and standpoint machinery rather than minting parallel mechanisms (Principle 4). It de-conflates concepts that surface vocabularies routinely collapse:

Post — the seat independent of the holder

gmeow:Post is a gufo:RoleMixin that represents a seat or position (the CFO chair) independently of who currently holds it. A Post is linked to exactly one Organization via the functional property gmeow:postIn. A gmeow:Membership may gmeow:fillsPost the Post, making the distinction between the seat and the sitter explicit.

This enables:

• Vacant posts: a Post exists with no Membership filling it.
• Succession in a post: two Memberships (successive tenures) fill the same Post.
• Org mismatch detection: SHACL warns when a Membership's membershipOrganization differs from the Post's postIn organization.

Organization type — an open value vocabulary

gmeow:OrganizationType is a gufo:QualityValue vocabulary (individuals, never subclasses — Principle 9). The seed values are:

• company — for-profit business
• nonprofit — not-for-profit organization
• governmentBody — public-sector body
• educationalInstitution — school, university, college
• association — society, union, or membership body
• collaboration — consortium, joint venture, standards body

These mirror ORG's FormalOrganization / OrganizationalUnit / OrganizationalCollaboration distinctions as co-equal values, not disjoint subclasses. A single organization may carry several types (a university that is also a nonprofit), and competing standpoint-indexed type claims coexist without privileging one (Principle 9).

Site — organizational location

gmeow:hasSite links an Organization to a gmeow:Location (from the places module), with gmeow:siteType marking the purpose:

• headquarters — principal office
• branch — subsidiary location
• registered — legal / registered office

Reusing the places module means a site is a first-class Place with coordinates, geometry, containment, and gazetteer coreference — not a flattened address string.

Multi-organization change events

Creation and destruction of a single organization reuse the universal lifecycle hooks (hasCreationEvent / hasDestructionEvent, with eventTypeCreation / eventTypeDestruction). Do not duplicate them.

Transitions that relate two or more organizations use the event module's universal Event with new EventType values:

• eventTypeMerger — two+ orgs combine
• eventTypeSplit — one org divides into two+
• eventTypeSpinOff — a part breaks away
• eventTypeAcquisition — one org acquires another
• eventTypeRename — same entity, new name (reuses the names module)

gmeow:predecessorOrganization and gmeow:successorOrganization link the orgs an event relates. A rename additionally uses the names module plus a temporal tenure (Facebook → Meta).

Contested succession

Post-merger or post-coup, rival successor claims coexist as standpoint-indexed statements (Principle 9). Two accordingTo-annotated successorOrganization claims on the same event are both retained — there is no preferredSuccessor. Withdrawn claims stay with displayable false, never deletion (Principle 10).

Legal identity

gmeow:legalIdentifier and gmeow:industryClassification are reified via the gmeow:Identifier class to avoid conflation when an organization carries multiple codes (e.g. LEI + ROR + NAICS). Each Identifier node bundles gmeow:identifierValue (the string) and gmeow:identifierScheme (lei, ror, naics, isicV4, etc.). Reification ensures SPARQL projections pair the correct value with its scheme. Optional gmeow:jurisdiction links to a gmeow:Location.

gmeow:Identifier as the universal external-identifier record

gmeow:Identifier is not organization-only — it is the universal reified external-identifier record. gmeow:hasIdentifier has domain gmeow:Entity, so a person carries an ORCID, a geni profile id, and a Nostr nip05 the same way an organization carries a LEI. It is the structured sibling of gmeow:authorityLink (coreference): a flat authorityLink points at an external record by IRI, while an Identifier decomposes the scheme, the scheme-local value, and the resolvable gmeow:identifierUrl — exactly the parts schema:PropertyValue (propertyID/value/url) and DataCite relatedIdentifier carry. The human display caption ("Geni profile", "ORCID iD") is the record's own rdfs:label, not a bespoke *Name property: a Name in GMEOW is a reified gmeow:Appellation borne by an entity (the names slice), whereas this is a plain display label, so the projection reads rdfs:label → schema:name. gmeow:legalIdentifier / gmeow:industryClassification / gmeow:jurisdiction specialise it for the organization case; the generic record serves every entity.

Purpose

gmeow:organizationPurpose is free text. Hierarchical resolution and cross-scheme mapping are solver-side computations (Principle 12); the logical core stays OWL 2 DL.

Alignment by reference

The mapping layer extends the existing shared alignment files:

All alignments are by reference (SSSOM / EDOAL / SPARQL projection) — never axiom copying (Principle 5).

Founding, ownership, and offerings (project homepage and language)

gmeow:foundedBy · gmeow:ownerOf

Flat founding and ownership edges (P4 reify-on-demand): gmeow:foundedBy / gmeow:founderOf and gmeow:ownerOf / gmeow:ownedBy. Non-functional and standpoint-indexable (contested founding/ownership coexist, P9); promote to an Event / ownership relator when date, share, or jurisdiction matter. Project to schema:founder / schema:owns.

gmeow:Offering · gmeow:ServiceOffering · gmeow:OpeningHoursSpecification

The minimal commercial-offerings surface (project homepage and language, P15 consumer: the bii profile). An agent gmeow:makesOffer an gmeow:Offering of some gmeow:itemOffered (a gmeow:ServiceOffering or any entity), provided by gmeow:offeringProvider. A service carries an open gmeow:serviceType and a gmeow:areaServed; opening hours are a reified gmeow:OpeningHoursSpecification (gmeow:openingDay from the open gmeow:DayOfWeek vocab, gmeow:opensAt / gmeow:closesAt). gmeow:ServiceOffering is distinct from the documents-slice gmeow:Service (a creative work). Projects to schema:Offer / Service / makesOffer / itemOffered / provider / serviceType / areaServed / OpeningHoursSpecification / dayOfWeek / opens / closes.