Gs1 Core Business Vocabulary

[Oreo Huppe]

ISOIEC 19988:2015 This GS1 Standard defines the Core Business Vocabulary (CBV). The goal of this standard is to specify various vocabulary elements and their values for use in conjunction with the EPCIS standard [EPCIS1.1], which defines mechanisms to exchange information both within and across organization boundaries. The vocabulary identifiers and definitions in this standard will ensure that all parties who exchange EPCIS data using the Core Business Vocabulary will have a common understanding of the semantic meaning of that data.

ISO/IEC 19988:2015 is intended to provide a basic capability that meets the above goal. In particular, this standard is designed to define vocabularies that are core to the EPCIS abstract data model and are applicable to a broad set of business scenarios common to many industries that have a desire or requirement to share data. This standard intends to provide a useful set of values and definitions that can be consistently understood by each party in the supply chain.

Additional end user requirements may be addressed by augmenting the vocabulary elements herein with additional vocabulary elements defined for a particular industry or a set of users or a single user. Additional values for the standard vocabulary types defined in this standard may be included in follow-on versions of this standard.

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The Registered Organization Vocabulary is a profile of the Organization Ontology for describing organizations that have gained legal entity status through a formal registration process, typically in a national or regional register.

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This is a vocabulary for describing organizations that have gained legal entity statusthrough a formal registration process, typically in a national or regional register.It focuses solely on such organizations and excludes natural persons, virtual organizations and other types of legal entity or 'agent' that are able to act. It is a profile of the moreflexible and comprehensive Organization Ontology [ ORG ]. The relationship between the Registered Organization Vocabulary (RegOrg) and the Organization Ontology is described below .

The Registered Organization Vocabulary includes a minimal number of classes and properties that are designed to capture the typical details recorded by business registers and thereby facilitate information exchange between them, although there is significant variation between business registers in what they record and publish.

The key class is rov:RegisteredOrganization and it is this class that represents a single business that became a legal entity through a formal registration process. It is a sub class of org:FormalOrganization that coversany legal entity, however created. The sub class relationship allows us to use all aspects of ORG such as the org:hasRegisteredSite property to link a registered organization with the site of its registered address. The registration process varies between different jurisdictions; in some cases it's the tax authority that registers a business, in others a separate register exists and so on.

As well as defining the rov:RegisteredOrganization class, thisvocabulary also makes use of classes defined elsewhere: the adms:Identifier class and the familiar skos:Concept . The Identifier class captures the legal and other identifiers, while the Concept class can be used to describe properties like the organization type, status and activity, that might be recognized across national borders.

The Registered Organization class is associated with the Identifier and Concept classes through 2 properties, adms:identifier and org:classification respectively. These have sub-properties with more specific semantics as depicted in the diagram and the following sections.

Line 3 gives the legally registered name of the company. In some jurisdictions,especially those where there are multiple official languages, a single companymay have several legal names and therefore it can be appropriate to usemultiple instances of the legalName property (language tags may, of course, be added).It is noteworthy that ORG assumes that an organization can only have a single legally recognized name (which is the common case)and therefore uses skos:prefLabel for this. It is the possibility of having more than one such name in a limitednumber of jurisdictions, that justifies the creation of rov:legalName .

Where a company is known informally by an alternative name of some sort, or a trading name, in addition to its legal name, then skos:altLabel should be used to provide those alternatives as is done in ORG.

In lines 4 and 5, URIs identify the organization status and organization type . Different jurisdictions willtypically define different values for organization status such as trading, insolvent andceased trading. Similarly there is a wide variety of organization types such as Plc, SA and GmbH although within a given jurisdiction there will be a limited number of defined terms. Even where the terms used in different jurisdictions are lexically identical, they may have slightly different legal meanings. The controlled list of values for organization type and organization statusshould be encoded as a SKOS Concept Scheme so that each ones has a URI.

Registers typically record the type of activity (or multiple activities) carried out. These are normally set out in a controlled vocabulary and again, these can vary from one jurisdiction to another.The UN's ISIC Codes [ ISIC4 ] form a common starting point for several such vocabularies includingthe European Union's NACE [ NACE ] Codes and UK's SIC codes [ SIC07 ]. The URIs shown as the values of rov:orgActivity in lines 6 and 7 assume that NACE codes are encoded as SKOS concepts.

Line 8 carries the crucial registration property that points to an Identifier class (defined in ADMS [ ADMS ]). Although formally the Registered Organization vocabulary has no mandatoryclasses or properties, the defining characteristic of a registered organization is that it is formally registered.This is the property that captures that information and links to the formal registration which is describedin lines 15 - 18. In this case, Apple Binding became a registered company on 12 September 2001 when UK Companies House issued it with the identifier 04285910. The identifier is typed in line with expectedpractice for skos:notation and the ORG ontology. Incidentally, UK Companies Housepublishes its information about registered companies as linked data and the example uses that URIas the subject of the description.

In addition to their company registration identifier, legal entities are very likely tohave other identifiers associated with them, such as tax numbers, VAT numbers etc. Line 9 points to an example of an additional identifier, one that does not confer legal status (or any other status) onthe company but that is potentially useful as an identifier.

A Registered Organization ( rov:RegisteredOrganization ) is a sub class ofthe Organization Ontology's Formal Organization ( org:FormalOrganization ).Furthermore, RegORG includes three sub properties of ORG's classification property coveringstatus, activity and type.

The key difference is the way in which identifiers are handled. In the ORG ontology, an organizationmay have an identifier expressed as a datatyped string (it uses a sub property of skos:notation ). For Registered Organizations, it is the identifier issued by the relevant registration authority that confers legal status and therefore always has particular significance. RegORG uses the ADMS classof Identifier (based on the UN/CEFACT class of the same name) to allow statements to be made about the identifier in a way not possible in ORG. Given data about a Registered Organization,it is possible to derive an org:identifier but the inverse is not true.

The Registered Organization class is central to the vocabulary. It represents an organization thatgains legal entity status by the act of registration cf. org:FormalOrganization that applies to any legal entity, including those created by other legal means. In many countries there is a single registry although in others, such as Spain and Germany, multiple registries exist.

Registered organizations are distinct from the broader concept of organizations, groups or, in some jurisdictions, sole traders. Many organizations exist that are not legal entities yet to the outside world they have staff, hierarchies, locations etc. Other organizations exist that are an umbrella for several legal entities (universities are often good examples of this).

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