[Mged-mage] Re: [microarray-ontol] Audit and Security; Re: Contact class question

[Tim E. <Tim...@ge...>]

"Tim Eyres" <Tim...@ge...> writes:

> My question is how does one record the organisation to which a
> person is connected? This can be important if the contact person is
> no longer available for some reason. For example if the person
> leaves the organisation and the contact information is not updated
> then when trying to track down a new contact person could be
> difficult if one does not know the department/organisation to which
> the person belonged.

Thanks a lot for the feedback on my question. It's good to know that this has
been thought about and that we are not going down the wrong track.

John Matese wrote:
> 
>  From the model's suggested  AuditAndSecurity package(pg30 of RFP), it
> appears that any one individual can affiliate with only one
> organization.  The self-describing nature of organization allows a
> person to belong to a lab, within a department, within a university.
> But this doesn't seem to allow a person to be associated with two
> separate labs or institutions.  Is this accurate?

I think this the ability to associate a person with one or more organizations is
quite an important thing to have, but not critical. In our model we state that a
person can be a member of one or more organizations, and an organization can
have one or more members. I think this is quite important to be future proof.

When it comes to implementing an organizational model in a real application I
feel a fully extendable hierarchical organization structure may be overkill. One
only needs a contact information, not to have a full organagram. Keeping a full
description up to date could be tricky, especially for external contacts. A
couple of reference points, person, department and organization could be
sufficient. What ever you like I guess.

Tim